On Saturday night, I witnessed a bit of artistic irony so elegant, Jackie Kennedy comes to mind.
It’s made even more so because it’s moral irony. It’s not pedantic and earnest, a non-smoker telling you how much better life will be if you quit. It delivers truth without a sermon.
And it’s located in a film about the murder of a child.
I was talking with my husband Saturday evening about an experience I had reading the manuscript of my book.
For the first time in my life, I’ve been able to look at all the crimes committed against me as a child and young woman. Until they were all written down, I didn’t realize how many I’ve survived. Now they’re in one place.
I’m no longer attached to these incidents. I’ve successfully worked through most of them with a highly skilled therapist. I don’t think about them often, and my life is no longer dictated by an ongoing trauma response.
But reading it all in black and white? It was upsetting, and for more than one reason.
Chief amongst them is my aversion to being thought of as a victim. Victims are vulnerable. It’s a bit worrisome to let it all go out into the world with the possibility of getting some dratted sympathy in return.
I never want to be an injured party.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons I’m obsessed with True Crime. It’s happening to someone else. As I watch and become the imaginary detective, I’m the powerful hero, not the powerless girl.
The joke in our house goes like this: my husband finds me glued to my laptop late at night and says,
“What is it tonight? Murder podcast or royal family?”
Murder podcast is the blanket phrase he uses for my True Crime obsession. I listen to very few podcasts, but I do watch every documentary which falls within the parameters of—I’m going to pay for this sentence—good taste.
That’s right. I like my murder tasteful.
I cannot abide torture. So killers like Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacey are out.
I am not a fan of shows or films which employ actors to “recreate” scenes. Occasionally it’s done well, but far too often it cheapens the work.
I am not a fan of redneck crime. I grew up around people like that. No thank you.
I prefer my victims and the investigators to have some intelligence.
Jim Sheridan’s Murder at the Cottage is the gold standard of the genre for me. I have watched the limited series countless times. It never gets old.
Sheridan is a filmmaker who directed Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot, and whose other work includes In the Name of the Father. He knows what he’s doing, is an Irishman (only Southern raconteurs can rival the Irish at storytelling) and the cinematography is unparallelled. What a masterpiece.
Every detail is sublime. When I think of certain scenes, music comes with memory. I picture the farm gate with a smear of blood and hear the single note of a violin. I can only assume it’s the highest compliment I might give a music editor.
But not every murder victim is Sophie Toscan du Plantier, the subject of Sheridan’s series. She was a beautiful French woman found beaten to death in the driveway of her holiday cottage in West Cork. The series works in large part because Sheridan is entranced with the victim. He makes the rest of us fall in love with her as well.
The villain of Sheridan’s piece, Ian Bailey, was fascinating; he died in January of this year. He appears so utterly obnoxious that a real quandary exists: did he kill Sophie? Or do people want him to be the killer, because he’s so easy to despise? Sheridan is not shy in pointing out the bias.
Sophie Toscan du Plantier died at her cottage on December 23, 1996. Two days later, on Christmas night, six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was murdered in the basement of her home in Boulder, Colorado.
My friend Barbara was murdered in 2022. Two of our mutually close friends were with her as she died.
It brought me up short. I realized watching a show about the death of someone I don’t know has nothing to do with how a murder feels to those left behind. I thought it might keep me from ever watching a True Crime series again.
It did not.
I sometimes ask myself why I’m still drawn to the genre, but I don’t like thinking about my answers.
Can we ever see death in someone else’s face?
When I look at a list of suspects and consider them, or if I see their mugshot, I’m always looking for a way to distinguish them.
Is there something visible to the human eye which indicates a person is capable of murder?
We’ve been told so many times that serial killers are monsters we believe this publicity. I think the answer is much more terrifying.
More people are capable of unspeakable violence than we’d like to admit. And by people, I mean men. An overwhelming majority of violent crime is committed by men.
It would be easier if we could just see the mark of the beast, so to speak. But we cannot. The reality is there is no way to completely protect ourselves from sexual predators and sadistic murderers. They walk freely amongst us, often under the mask of patient eyes and understanding expressions.
We want killers to be monsters, but they’re not. They’re human.
We forget we’re the deadliest species on the planet.
—-
After I talked with my husband about reading the last draft of the book, I wanted to unwind. I’d been working all day to finish the last bit of editing. It’s going to Beta Readers this week.
Murder podcast to the rescue.
While sorting through titles, I saw there was a new JonBenét Ramsey documentary on Netflix: Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey, by director Joe Berlinger.
Some cases—always unsolved—have stayed with me longer than others. I will probably go to my grave thinking if just given a simple map and a couple of months in Portugal, I could find the unmarked grave of Madeleine McCann.
But the murder of JonBenét Ramsay never held my attention for very long. With all the facts published in the press, it always seemed obvious someone in her family killed her. And the circumstances of her life seemed sordid.
I decided to give it a try anyway. Perhaps I might be able to figure out why the Ramseys were protecting the killer. Because if they weren’t guilty, certainly they knew who was.
If you’re too young to know about JonBenét, she was a child beauty contestant from a wealthy family who was brutally assaulted and murdered in her own home over the Christmas holiday. It may have been the biggest news story of my lifetime. Media coverage was incessant and tawdry and awful. Her parents were tried in the press.
I thought they deserved it.
Like most people familiar with her murder, I always looked at her parents—particularly her mother—as guilty parties. If they weren’t guilty of killing their child, they were guilty of putting her into adult costumes, painting her perfect face with big makeup, teasing her hair, and sexualizing their young daughter in atrocious public displays.
On this, I was absolute.
In 2008, after years under suspicion, the District Attorney in Boulder wrote a letter apologizing to the Ramseys and clearing them as suspects. Unfortunately, Patsy Ramsey didn’t live long enough to read it. She died in 2006.
But this didn’t change my mind completely. They may not have killed her, but they were covering up something.
There were other undeniable facts, even if the DNA didn’t match. Patsy’s handwriting matching the ransom note, finding JonBenét in their basement, covering up for the older brother, refusing to let the police interview them, hiring a defense attorney and a publicist…the list seems endless.
I’m an educated True Crime enthusiast. I know my facts.
The moment of elegant irony was hard to miss.
I knew Patsy Ramsey had been a beauty pageant contestant when she was younger. I figured she put JonBenét in these awful pageants because she was a middle-aged mother, missed her youthful beauty, and decided to live through her daughter.
Unforgiveable.
I didn’t realize that shortly before JonBenét was killed, Patsy had gone through a brutal year of chemotherapy to treat ovarian cancer.
When her daughter died, Patsy was in remission, but ovarian cancer is an unrelenting beast of a disease.
There was footage of Patsy in her twenties in some Miss West Virginia pageant. She says JonBenét watched it with her and wanted to know if she could do pageants.
John Ramsey chimed in then, saying although he hadn’t mentioned it to his wife at the time, he assumed she did the pageants with JonBenét because she didn’t know if she’d live long enough to see her do one when she was older.
Suddenly, I see the enormity of my bias.
Patsy wasn’t an ambitious mother trying to make her child a star. Perhaps she was just a mother wanting to give her child a shared experience before she died of cancer.
This is the start of the undoing. I still think pageants are dreadful. But it’s much easier for me to forgive Patsy Ramsey when I see the experience through this lens.
Sympathy for Patsy Ramsey didn’t sell papers. Bias did.
The crack begins. Jackie Kennedy slips into the room.
Then Jackie Kennedy sits down and offers me some tea as she dismantles everything I thought I knew about the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.
Brick by brick, every stone-cold “fact” reported by the press was dismantled.
I had a feeling this was the direction of the film right off the bat. It’s revealed that three weeks after the murder, Bolder police had some DNA results back from the lab which eliminated any of the Ramseys as suspects.
The inexperienced homicide team that bungled the investigation from the very beginning always had the Ramseys in their sights. The physical evidence didn’t fit with their suspect’s profile. So, they didn’t release it.
This series was much less pleasant to watch than most True Crime. The amount of graphic detail discussed about the murder was excruciating. There could be no trigger warning strong enough for the topics it broaches.
I found myself asking how can it ever be wise to listen to a pedophile go into specific, graphic fantasy about how he murdered a child? It was beyond disturbing. It seemed pornographic.
Well, yes.
And then I realized what director Berlinger was doing.
There’s no way you can eat popcorn through this movie, or sleep well afterwards, or even chat with your friends about it the next day. The details of the crime stop you. Speaking of it as an entertainment is obscene, indecent.
This is the truth without the lesson.
This is what murder really is: barbaric, sickening cruelty. This is it, the movie says. This is what I’m chasing as I scroll through the titles on Prime, Hulu, Netflix, or Topic. I can no longer justify watching True Crime without admitting what I’m doing: deriving a safe thrill from the real-life hellscape of other humans.
I don’t want to do it anymore.
I got every single detail of the case wrong, as a direct result of my thirst for it. Media outlets played up every bias against the Ramseys, and I bought it.
The truth about True Crime is simple: I know nothing. I’m just playing Nancy Drew.
It doesn’t leave me feeling good. Nor should it.
I had a deal with True Crime.
I stream a show about a murder or disappearance. True Crime delivers a high-stakes, riveting world in which I live even after I’ve closed my laptop. I spend time thinking about the people involved. I weigh evidence. I follow hunches.
I try to solve the murder. The industry puts another notch in its ratings belt.
I know I’m not alone. True Crime has become a huge industry, with 84% of Americans having consumed some version of it.
I don’t know if I’ll never watch any True Crime again. All I can tell you is I haven’t since Saturday night.
Being an imaginary detective is a poor substitute for power.
I’m after the real thing. I’m tired of living in a world where so many women and children are powerless over what happens to them.
I get attached to being right.
It’s the whole point of the murder industry, isn’t it? We all want to put the puzzle together. If there’s a crime, there’s a message board full of people’s theories.
But I can’t talk to my husband about what happened to me as a child, then entertain myself by watching a documentary about a child’s murder.
And I thank Joe Berlinger for his elegant sleight of hand. The series proves its own genre is bullshit. That’s how good it is.
Love your insights, Liz . Having a survivor story myself I believe there is something more than curious why I watch similar genre !
This was a good one. I want to send it to every one of my friends who love to binge true crime. I understand the appeal, but I wish it didn’t exist as a genre. Thank you for writing with cogent vulnerability and honesty. Always.