Have the Krays captivated generations because of their crime story, or because we fetishize twins?
True crime writer Harold Schechter posed a question this week* that Sarah and I can’t get out of our heads: “Why do some crimes become media sensations and cultural touchstones, while others more horrifying fade into obscurity?” When we’re talking about crimes of the distant past, there’s one obvious answer, of course, because whoever owned the press owned the truth. But for the last couple centuries, media outlets have been in hot competition to find the next big thing, and stories that bleed most decidedly lead. Add to that the current wave of true crime, and it’s clear that there’s some hard-to-define reason why some true crime tales grab the public’s attention, while others are briefly reported on and then dropped. Why do you think that is?
*in an excerpt from his new book, Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer, available to order here.
Good question. I guess it's often some combination of socio-economic factors related to the victims, survivors, and criminals. I don't know how much of my own proclivities can be extrapolated to the culture at large, but I will talk about myself anyway.
I have pet subjects that interest me the most. Twins or other close siblings. Any story where a religious person is shown to be a massive hypocrite. Mothers with Munchhausen by proxy. Secret lairs where kidnappers have hidden their victims. Impostors. Woman-on-woman crime, such as women who fake pregnancies and then kidnap pregnant women and steal (or attempt to steal) the babies. Family annihilators. Teen groupthink. Cults.
There are also plenty of crimes that I'm not interested in at all: financial crimes involving the stock market and banking; organized crime; military crime; terrorism. Most of those topics that bore me are very male-centric. Much the same way as I have no interest in war movies/books and westerns, crime stories solely about men are a huge yawn to me.
Bill James's "Popular Crime" has an entire chapter devoted to trying to quantify these factors. I'm-a dig it out this weekend and see if I can boil it down to a sentence or two. - SDB
So, what are some crimes that faded into obscurity faster than you would have expected? I know there are lots, but I'm struggling to think of any right now. Hmmm. . . .
I have to chime in to represent the financial and systems crimes enthusiasts. (Although I do love a good religious or political hypocrisy scandal and the college admissions scandal has been a treat! I myself attended Last Chance State College, so... schadenfraude, I’m feeling it!!). Hearing about crimes that impact entire systems, that effect all of us and require me to read whole sections to grasp what happened- I love it. I’m still learning who set the stage for the sub prime loan thefts. That was fraud on a massive, mind bending scale. It does give me so much rage I have ulcers I don’t know what to do with. And it’s pretty much all entitled white men. Hard to relate to that on any level!
It would be interesting to see if you could boil it down to a formula: number of victims x horrible acts + done by someone you’d never suspect. Add a dash of police misconduct squared by good old boys club; double it for religious fanatics exposed to be mendacious tools and divide by extremely wealthy participants OR a crime representing current zeitgeist and you have something that will be remembered past all reason. Oh, it’s also better if it’s unsolved. Just a soupçon of that, though - otherwise your soufflé won’t rise.
I think in terms of notoriety, it's size, scale, and fame of either perp or victim. The crimes that grab the headlines involve lots of victims, lots of blood, and someone famous. It helps if the victim is young whit and pretty (or the perpetrator for that matter. I'm assuming other people were also guilty of admissions fraud.) It's starting to get a little better but those are still most of the headline crimes.
I think James is probably right that there’s an attraction to bizarre or celebrity crimes, but I think a lot of the most famous crimes get that way because they give us a socially acceptable place to talk about rifts in society, about class or gender or race in a way that is less divisive. It seems clear to me that the fascination with Jon Benet Ramsey, for instance, is at least partially a way of taking about the sexualization of young girls. I’d posit that there are societal cleavages that we have a hard time dealing with, and true crime can serve a societal function by giving us a safe way to do so (and, in doing so, paper over some of those divides: I feel like Ramsey, again, led to a general consensus that sexualization of the under 10 set was a little much).
I also think that a skilled presentation of a case can make a case important, by linking a case to a major issue, by using it as a way to talk about social divides. James seems to argue that cases are inherently attention grabbing or not: I think that an otherwise pedestrian case can become emblematic in the right hands (think “In Cold Blood”).
Good question. I guess it's often some combination of socio-economic factors related to the victims, survivors, and criminals. I don't know how much of my own proclivities can be extrapolated to the culture at large, but I will talk about myself anyway.
I have pet subjects that interest me the most. Twins or other close siblings. Any story where a religious person is shown to be a massive hypocrite. Mothers with Munchhausen by proxy. Secret lairs where kidnappers have hidden their victims. Impostors. Woman-on-woman crime, such as women who fake pregnancies and then kidnap pregnant women and steal (or attempt to steal) the babies. Family annihilators. Teen groupthink. Cults.
There are also plenty of crimes that I'm not interested in at all: financial crimes involving the stock market and banking; organized crime; military crime; terrorism. Most of those topics that bore me are very male-centric. Much the same way as I have no interest in war movies/books and westerns, crime stories solely about men are a huge yawn to me.
Bill James's "Popular Crime" has an entire chapter devoted to trying to quantify these factors. I'm-a dig it out this weekend and see if I can boil it down to a sentence or two. - SDB
So, what are some crimes that faded into obscurity faster than you would have expected? I know there are lots, but I'm struggling to think of any right now. Hmmm. . . .
I have to chime in to represent the financial and systems crimes enthusiasts. (Although I do love a good religious or political hypocrisy scandal and the college admissions scandal has been a treat! I myself attended Last Chance State College, so... schadenfraude, I’m feeling it!!). Hearing about crimes that impact entire systems, that effect all of us and require me to read whole sections to grasp what happened- I love it. I’m still learning who set the stage for the sub prime loan thefts. That was fraud on a massive, mind bending scale. It does give me so much rage I have ulcers I don’t know what to do with. And it’s pretty much all entitled white men. Hard to relate to that on any level!
It would be interesting to see if you could boil it down to a formula: number of victims x horrible acts + done by someone you’d never suspect. Add a dash of police misconduct squared by good old boys club; double it for religious fanatics exposed to be mendacious tools and divide by extremely wealthy participants OR a crime representing current zeitgeist and you have something that will be remembered past all reason. Oh, it’s also better if it’s unsolved. Just a soupçon of that, though - otherwise your soufflé won’t rise.
Some factors: white victims, level of outrage, how bizarre or gross were the acts, how famous were the victims.
I think in terms of notoriety, it's size, scale, and fame of either perp or victim. The crimes that grab the headlines involve lots of victims, lots of blood, and someone famous. It helps if the victim is young whit and pretty (or the perpetrator for that matter. I'm assuming other people were also guilty of admissions fraud.) It's starting to get a little better but those are still most of the headline crimes.
I think James is probably right that there’s an attraction to bizarre or celebrity crimes, but I think a lot of the most famous crimes get that way because they give us a socially acceptable place to talk about rifts in society, about class or gender or race in a way that is less divisive. It seems clear to me that the fascination with Jon Benet Ramsey, for instance, is at least partially a way of taking about the sexualization of young girls. I’d posit that there are societal cleavages that we have a hard time dealing with, and true crime can serve a societal function by giving us a safe way to do so (and, in doing so, paper over some of those divides: I feel like Ramsey, again, led to a general consensus that sexualization of the under 10 set was a little much).
I also think that a skilled presentation of a case can make a case important, by linking a case to a major issue, by using it as a way to talk about social divides. James seems to argue that cases are inherently attention grabbing or not: I think that an otherwise pedestrian case can become emblematic in the right hands (think “In Cold Blood”).