And why was it that I was allowed to move on, and you weren’t? I never felt the urge to hurt the people around me, but that wasn’t a choice; it was a lack of compulsion. And if I had wanted to hurt people, would I have tried to get help? Where would I have gone? Where would I go tomorrow, if the need suddenly appeared and took control of me?
The insects’ singing vibrates the grass. I am sweating so much I think I might be melting. I have come as close to looking at you as I possibly can, Ted, and like Polly Nelson before me, I feel only pity. I thought I wasn’t allowed to feel just that: I thought I had to feel fear when I looked at you, fear of the demon core you held, because looking at it too closely would mean witnessing your evil, and knowing that it burned in me, too. Isn’t that what all these terrified men see when they look at you, Ted? But we can be scared this way only by beliefs we feel we could share. I do not believe that the harm you caused made you somehow powerful, but for all the time I have been looking at you, I have felt the people around me looking at you that way. Why are we so determined to estimate a victim total? Why are the numbers we guess always so high? How many people do we want you to have killed?
What made you the way you were? Which chemicals did your brain misproduce, which cells didn’t divide, how many crucial grains of love and nurture were blown out of your life and allowed to stay in mine at the moment when they most mattered? I am tired of being told that there is something in the abyss that will glower back at me, and make me want to stop looking. I have grasped for your demon core, Ted, and I have found nothing, again and again. The good men lied. I have found only humanity, only a need to love and feel loved as well as we can, and the fact that some of us can do this easily, and some of us hardly at all, and I cannot imagine a reality where someone would choose violence over love, emptiness over love, feeling lost the way you did, lost the way I did, over love, when love is there. I don’t think love was there for you, and I don’t know why it wasn’t, and I’m tired of being told there’s no point in searching for answers that might lead to solutions, tired of living in a world where some people are just born bad, and all we can do is wait to catch and destroy them, and where catching and destroying a monster means waiting until they start killing women and girls. I am tired of living in a world where this is the only story we can tell. I am tired of this story. I want a new one.
IT IS DIFFICULT TO SEE TED BUNDY AS HUMAN. IT IS DIFFICULT even to entertain the belief that he did not need to destroy as many lives as he did, or that his own life could have been different. Believing this means believing that Ted Bundy and others who commit crimes like his are not born irreparably wrong, are not unavoidably evil, do not belong to a separate species from the rest of us. This is a frightening conclusion to draw: that the actions and crimes and atrocities we so often call “inhuman” do, in fact, belong to humanity, because they are committed by human beings. Rejecting the label of “psychopath,” not just for Ted Bundy but for anyone, means accepting that it is not a hard, scientific fact that we could never do what they have done—and that we could, under different circumstances, go down the same path they did.
But there is hope in this conclusion, too. It means their paths were not inevitable. It means there was a time when they might have come back, away from violence, away from emptiness, and toward attachment, toward empathy, toward the bright and benevolent side of human behavior we have grandiosely labeled “humanity.” It means that those we call lost do not need to stay lost forever. It means that we, too, can be found.
Originally published by The Believer, February 2018
The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime
By Alice Bolin
The “true-crime boom” of the mid- to late 2010s is a strange pop-culture phenomenon, given that it is not so much a new type of programming as an acknowledgment of a centuries-long obsession: people love true stories about murder and other brands of brutality and grift, and they have gorged on them particularly since the beginning of modern journalism. The serial fiction of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins was influenced by the British public’s obsessive tracking of sensational true-crime cases in daily papers, and since then, we have hoarded gory details in tabloids and pulp paperbacks and nightly news shows and Wikipedia articles and Reddit threads.
I don’t deny these stories have proliferated in the past five years. Since the secret is out—“Oh, you love murder? Me too!”—entire TV networks, podcast genres, and countless limited-run docuseries have arisen to satisfy this rumbling hunger. It is tempting to call this true-crime boom new because of the prestige sheen of many of its artifacts—Serial and Dirty John and The Jinx and Wild Wild Country are all conspicuously well made, with lovely visuals and strong reporting. They have subtle senses of theme and character, and they often feel professional, pensive, quiet—so far from vulgar or sensational.
But well-told stories about crime are not really new, and neither is their popularity. In Cold Blood is a classic of American literature, and The Executioner’s Song won the Pulitzer; Errol Morris has used crime again and again in his documentaries to probe ideas like fame, desire, corruption, and justice. The new true-crime boom is more simply a matter of volume and shamelessness: the wide array of crime stories we can now openly indulge in, with conventions of the true-crime genre more emphatically repeated and codified, more creatively expanded and trespassed against. In 2016, after two critically acclaimed series about the O.J. Simpson trial, there was talk that the 1996 murder of Colorado six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey would be the next case to get the same treatment. It was odd, hearing O.J.: Made in America, the epic and depressing account of race and celebrity that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, discussed in the same breath with the half dozen unnecessary TV specials dredging up the Ramsey case. Despite my avowed love of Dateline, I would not have watched these JonBenét specials had a magazine not paid me to, and suffice it to say they did very little to either solve the 20-year-old crime (ha!) or examine our collective obsession with it.
Clearly, the insight, production values, or cultural capital of its shiniest products are not what drives this new wave of crime stories. O.J.: Made in America happened to be great and the JonBenét specials happened to be terrible, but producers saw them as part of the same trend because they knew they would appeal to at least part of the same audience. I’ve been thinking a lot about these gaps between high and low, since there are people who consume all murder content indiscriminately, and another subset who only allow themselves to enjoy the “smart” kind. The difference between highbrow and lowbrow in the new true crime is often purely aesthetic. It is easier than ever for producers to create stories that look good and seem serious, especially because there are templates now for a style and voice that make horrifying stories go down easy and leave the viewer wanting more. But for these so-called prestige true-crime offerings, the question of ethics—of the potential to interfere in real criminal cases and real people’s lives—is even more important, precisely because they are taken seriously.
Like the sensational tone, disturbing, clinical detail, and authoritarian subtext that have long defined schlocky true crime as “trash,” the prestige true-crime subgenre has developed its own shorthand, a language to tell its audience they’re consuming something thoughtful, college-educated, public-radio influenced. In addition to slick and creative production, highbrow true crime focuses on character sketches instead of police procedure. “We’re public radio producers who are curious about why people do what they do,” Phoebe Judge, the host of the podcast Criminal, said. Judge has interviewed criminals (a bank robber, a marijuana brownie dealer), victims, and investigators, using crime as a very simple window into some of the most interesting and complicated lives on the planet.