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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2020 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/murdertaleofmode01knox 
 
/Aurcer 
 
 A Tale of Modern American Life 
 
 Sara L. Knox 
 
 Duke University Press Durham & London 
 
 1998 
 
© 1998 Duke University Press 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 on acid-free paper 00 
 Typeset in Janson with Lettres Eclatees 
 display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. 
 
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication 
 Data appear on the last printed 
 page of this book. 
 
To my parents , Heather and Ray , 
 for their love and support , 
 and to Emma 
 
Blood is not a thing at all but is a tale . 
 Cormac McCarthy 
 

 
Contents 
 
 Acknowledgments xi 
 Introduction i 
 
 Part i: The Killers 13 
 
 1. Here There Be Killers 15 
 
 2. Parens Patriae 2 9 
 
 3. Min(d)ing the Murderer 5 2 
 
 4. True Crime Romance I: A Genre Defiled 79 
 
 5. True Crime Romance II: Portentous Meetings 107 
 
 6. True Crime Romance III: The Honeymoon Killers 128 
 
 Part 2: The Killed 143 
 
 7. Killing Grounds 145 
 
 8. Ghosts 163 
 
 9. The Cast in Order of Disappearance 189 
 
 Appendix: Varying Accounts of the Murder of Janet Fay 
 Notes 221 
 
 Select Bibliography 269 
 Index 279 
 

Acknowledgments 
 
 I acknowledge gratefully the aid of Barry Grennan, chief 
 of the Major Offenses Bureau, Office of the District Attorney, 
 Mineola, New York, and, naturally, his staff, for making available 
 the transcript and case materials of People v. Fernandez. My thanks 
 also to Mr. Grennan for his courtesy in allowing me to share his 
 office for the duration of my stay there. Thanks are due as well to 
 Mr. Henry Devine — retired assistant district attorney for Nassau 
 County — for his willingness to share his recollections of the 
 Fernandez case with me, and to John Guastello, clerk of the New 
 York Supreme Court, Queens, for his aid in helping me run to 
 ground the transcript. To my supervisors at the dissertation level, 
 Professor John Salmond and Dr. Lucy Frost, whose faith in my 
 sometimes wayward enthusiasm was invaluable, I am grateful. 
 Special thanks are due to my sister, Elizabeth, for her editorial 
 suggestions on the manuscript, especially her attention to matters 
 of tone and style. Lastly, I am indebted to Cathy Davidson, 
 
 Duke University, for her encouragement. 
 

 
Introduction 
 
 It was night when I arrived, disorientated, at the international terminal of 
 Salt Lake City airport. Until then America had been to me the long 
 stretches of blue carpet and rubber tiling that I had wheeled the luggage 
 trolley over as I trailed from Immigration to the Delta terminal at lax. 
 Outside, through the burnished glass of the windows, the Los Angeles 
 sunshine was dirty with smoke from the still-burning fires out at Malibu. 
 The air cleared and paled as I flew across the Mojave desert and on over 
 the snowcapped ranges rimming Provo and Salt Lake City. I had spoken 
 then only a little to flight attendants, immigration officials, and airline 
 employees. Everyone seemed to want to call me “Ma’am.” Personally, I 
 felt that I fitted the tide poorly. 
 
 The cab driver who ferried me from the airport to Salt Lake City itself 
 did not call me “Ma’am.” He mildly wondered at my accent and seemed 
 vague about its origins, even after my explanation. As I eyed the bill¬ 
 boards and freeway exit signs, he asked me what I’d come to America for. 
 I had my summary ready, the blurb I’d be repeating in clubs, bars, and 
 dinner parties for the next two months. 
 
 “I’m writing a Ph.D. on murder in modern American culture. Not 
 how it happens, but what people want out of the retelling of stories of 
 murder.” 
 
 At that I faltered, trailing off into silence. The taxi driver was quiet 
 too. 
 
 “It’s sort of a cultural studies thing,” I added lamely. 
 
 The driver half-turned, laying his arm over the back of the seat. 
 
 “Well you sure have come to the right place. People are getting killed 
 all the time.” 
 
 The driver told me how he’d come to Salt Lake City for its peace and 
 
quiet. He had lived too long, he said, in big cities. I told him that I was 
 headed for New York. He nodded, and kept nodding, almost as if he were 
 sorry for me somehow. 
 
 “That’s the place to go for murder.” 
 
 “Yeah.” I agreed, trying to shift the vowel sound so my assent would 
 come out properly, prosaically, American. 
 
 When he dropped me off outside my motel he told me to be careful. I 
 said I would be. 
 
 But I wasn’t, necessarily. On my first night in Manhattan I locked 
 myself out of my apartment. While I squatted in the sixth-floor corridor, 
 staring ruefully at the closed door, I heard — for the first time in my life — 
 the distinctive sound of automatic gunfire, coming from somewhere over 
 in Harlem. I wasn’t careful when I decided, after a late night out in 
 Greenwich Village, to take the i or the 9 home. I wasn’t careful the days I 
 walked alone through Riverside Park, where four women had been raped 
 during the past month. 
 
 I had been given a pragmatic definition of “careful” by the woman I was 
 staying with. She told me not to walk the extra distance from the 116th 
 Street station to home. I was more likely to be stabbed, shot, raped, 
 or have my bag snatched as I sauntered through Sakura Park, dodging 
 the bundled-up dog owners exercising their pets, than I was crossing 
 Tiemann onto Riverside Drive. She told me not to buy into the “segrega¬ 
 tionist bullshit,” and to do my shopping in the stores nearest us, in Har¬ 
 lem, rather than in the overpriced delis scattered throughout the Colum¬ 
 bia district. And so I did. 
 
 I did pride myself on the care I exercised in my research out in Mineola 
 at the county 7 courthouse. I caught my train out on the Long Island 
 Railroad every morning and chatted to the district attorney’s secretarial 
 support staff to show I was keen, and friendly 7 to boot. The District 
 Attorney’s Office had never had its own scholar before, and they extended 
 me every courtesy: coffee and photocopying, and a chair and desk in the 
 office of the chief of the Major Offenses Bureau. I was clearly visible there 
 daily, sitting forward in my 7 chair, doggedly reading through the nine 
 volumes of People v. Fernandez. My presence elicited much curiosity. I had 
 my spiel ready. The tall, wide homicide detectives who seemed to be 
 forever conferencing in low tones out in the hallways were particularly 
 intrigued by me. They extricated themselves from the latest speculation 
 
 2 Murder 
 
on the Buttafuco case (then being heard in one of the courtrooms below) 
 and drifted in to chat with the chief of Major Offenses. Being big men, 
 they proceeded to crowd out the office and were forced, then and there, 
 to make my acquaintance. 
 
 They made me nervous. I was conscious of how odd I looked to them. 
 When they asked me what I was doing there, I could barely manage to 
 squeeze out a single line in reply. 
 
 “Oh, I’m studying murder.” 
 
 Their eyes lit up; they warmed to me immediately. They called me 
 “Ma’am,” offered me gum, coffee, cigarettes, donuts. They started to tell 
 me about murder: their terrain, their expertise. I listened and nodded — 
 their very interest part of the evidence arrayed before me. 
 
 When I had finished with the trial transcript, the chief of the Major 
 Offenses Bureau, Barry Grennan, set me up with a date at the Mineola 
 Police Department to examine the police files on the case, a source that 
 promised to fill in some of the more worrying gaps in my research. The 
 night before I was due out there, a man named Colin Ferguson boarded 
 one of the outward-bound trains to Mineola and, after crossing the 
 county line, walked through the carriage firing his automatic weapon into 
 the seated bodies of the homeward-bound commuters. That night, when 
 the mass killer was taken into custody, he appeared on the tv screen 
 flanked by the two big detectives who had earlier been swapping stories 
 with me. The Mineola Police Department was in an uproar, functionally 
 cordoned off by the press and their cameras. I decided that it would be 
 better if I didn’t go out there. A practical definition of safety weighed out 
 over the scholarly ideal of care. 
 
 Researching murder is an ethically ticklish occupation, although histor¬ 
 ical and sociological research per se carries with it ethical as well as 
 methodological problems. Part of that ticklish quality is the reaction of 
 others to one’s project. If I say I’m interested in murder, I lay myself open 
 to the charge — as Wendy Lesser has put it — of “sleaziness.” 1 Yet even the 
 horrified reactions of those who mildly enquire after the research topic 
 point to an interest in murder that is general, if not universal. That 
 interest has spurred a small number of scholarly enquiries and a much 
 larger number of mystery, detective, and “true crime” works (not to men¬ 
 tion the many literary works that deal to some extent with an epistemol- 
 
 Introduction 3 
 
ogy or metaphysics of murder). All these works attest to the “interested¬ 
 ness” of American culture in murder narratives. 
 
 Murder stories elicit more interest, in their power to plumb the mys¬ 
 teries of mortality, than might seem justified by the frequency and variety 
 of murders that daily occur in the United States. According to the vital 
 statistics, a white man aged between twenty-five and forty-four is more 
 likely to die in a car accident, succumb to an aids -defining illness, or die 
 by his own hand than he is to be a murder victim. 2 African American men 
 and women (and, to a lesser degree, Latino men and Latina women) are 
 less likely to die by their own hand, but are conversely much more at risk of 
 violent death than their white counterparts. That discrepancy is signifi¬ 
 cant, and it is one that will be returned to throughout this book. If we 
 remain, however, with the law of large numbers, we can see that the 
 interest in murder within contemporary' America (whose majority is 
 made up by those least likely to die by violence) does not derive from 
 experience — from some common cause of death that inexorably claims 
 family, lovers, friends, and acquaintances. The “facts” of death attested to 
 by the survivors are out of step with much of contemporary American 
 culture’s narrative reckoning of threat. Nor can the excessive interest be 
 solely the product of news media that consider murder to be infinitely 
 more interesting than the aids pandemic, suicide, or the willy-nilly 
 slaughter enacted on American roads. (After all, the phenomenon of 
 “newsworthiness” cannot be reduced to the proposition that news creates 
 an interest not already there.) This book is an exploration of the various 
 means by which the tale of murder claims the interest it does in contem¬ 
 porary 7 America; it is an exploration of the constancy and change of that 
 interest dependent upon the particular conditions of period, disciplinary 
 framework, medium, and genre. 
 
 I intend to deal, generally, with the cultural impulses that drive the 
 narrator of the tale of murder —whatever its medium, form, or ostensible 
 genre — to tell a story 7 that will encompass and address questions ancillary 
 to the actual subject. Mine is an analysis preoccupied, therefore, with 
 mediation and with the structure of authority in the murder narrative. 
 For the /luthor and the author of a murder are not, of course, necessarily 
 identical. It is the author/mediator, rather than the author/murderer, 
 who is the focus of this book —along with the sensibilities of the story¬ 
 teller, whose tale of murder must somehow necessarily be about the sto- 
 
 4 Murder 
 
ryteller’s own distance from the murderous subject. This is the case even 
 when the author/mediator and author/murderer are identical. Nathan 
 Leopold’s autobiography, Life plus pp Years, is fundamentally concerned 
 with demonstrating the difference between his “mature” self and that 
 “unstable” nineteen-year-old who was sentenced, with Richard Loeb, to 
 life imprisonment for bludgeoning to death Bobby Franks. 
 
 The first chapter sets out my definition of the “interestedness” of 
 American culture in the tale of murder, and in the legal homicide enacted 
 in the public’s name. By brief reference to the tropic relationship of death 
 and femininity and the difficult relationship of the “real” to its representa¬ 
 tions, my opening chapter also establishes the general parameters of en¬ 
 quiry for the critique in the chapters following. Chapter One investigates 
 an early study —one of very few that provide a cultural and historical 
 frame for American fictional studies of murder — namely, David Brion 
 Davis’s Homicide in American Fiction. Davis’s analysis of the nineteenth- 
 century tale of seduction and the moral underpinnings of the sentimental 
 novel allows us a first glimpse at the discursive characteristics of murder 
 narrative: the psychiatrization of the murderer; sexuality and gender as 
 pathology; confession, secrecy, and truth; metaphysical speculation and 
 the mystification of mortality. 3 The contemporary work of Bill Ellis and 
 Joel Black, on the other hand, is concerned with the relationship of repre¬ 
 sentations of murder to the actuality of violence. Ellis, discussing the scare 
 around satanic cults, has concluded that the rumor, the report, and the 
 urban myth combine to concretize the possibility of events previously 
 only conjectured. Ellis’s work on “ostension” and Black’s analysis of the 
 “hyperrealization” of violence together offer an analytic springboard for 
 my own critique of the ability of murder narrative to survive, so to speak, 
 “out of the womb” of fact to which it supposedly refers. 4 Attention to the 
 works of Davis and Black is obligatory in a project of this sort because they 
 (along with Wendy Lesser, whose work is dealt with in the final chapter) 
 have provided practically the only scholarly studies of murder in narrative 
 or murder as narrative. 
 
 The second and third chapters demonstrate the ways in which texts of 
 the earlier period (1946-1956) sought to harness the meaning of murder, 
 whether metaphorically (as a moral tale) or actually (in law or forensic 
 psychiatry, where classification of the murderer is aimed at revealing 
 greater psychological or social “truths” about the genus from which he 
 
 Introduction 5 
 
arises). I have chosen Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door and William 
 March’s The Bad Seed because their works seem to fall squarely between 
 “high” and “popular” fiction — between, say, the metaphysical and the 
 commonsense explanations of murderous violence in America after the 
 Second World War. By writing this I do not mean to suggest a continuum 
 of complexity and simplicity, with high literature at one end and pulp at 
 the other. The complexity of a narrative encoding of murder is neither 
 governed nor necessarily limited by discipline, medium, genre, or style. 
 In the quite different texts of these two chapters, fiction and nonfiction 
 alike, authority is inscribed in the narrative by reference to the common- 
 sensical, the banal, and the everyday as well as the metaphorical and the 
 mythic. Whatever the authority referred to, the narrative coheres around 
 something quite other than actual events. Beneath the descriptive narra¬ 
 tive structures of myth that Dr. Fredric Wertham employs to unravel his 
 patients’ psyches there lies the scientific expert’s desire to classify and to 
 contain. 5 And within the grimly deterministic naturalism of Motley’s pic¬ 
 ture of slum life, 6 or the cynical fatalism of March’s portrait of human¬ 
 kind’s essentially violent nature, lies a naive adulation of innocence and 
 redemption, a fear of precocity and corruption. 7 Like Wertham, Judge 
 Curtis Bok writes his fictional account as a sociological tract, using the 
 lyricism of metaphor to elucidate the meaning not just of a particular 
 murderous act and its agent, but of a proper moral response to violence in 
 general. 8 
 
 These earlier texts use murder to define “civilization” and to determine 
 the shape of an evolving and therefore malleable humanity. The sen¬ 
 sibilities of the authors range from the classically liberal — with an atten¬ 
 tiveness both to right and rights — to the progressive, critical of institu¬ 
 tional inequality. Of the four authors selected, William March focuses 
 more narrowly upon the “intransigence” of evil, an intransigence that 
 Curtis Bok and Fredric Wertham qualify. 
 
 Wertham’s The Show of Violence has been selected because of its popu¬ 
 larization of forensic psychology and because of the author’s status as a 
 forensic psychologist. Curtis Bok, on the other hand, has been chosen not 
 because Star Wormwood itself was influential, but because Bok enjoyed 
 distinctive status as an “expert”: he was a seasoned jurist, had served on 
 the court of last resort in Pennsylvania, and came from an esteemed 
 family of lawyers. I aim, then, at a critique of the “expert” in order to 
 
 6 Murder 
 
show the importance of expert authority in the reauthoring of nonfic- 
 tional tales of murder. Wertham and Bok backtrack along the trail of their 
 patients’ disturbed minds, seeking to explain and ultimately control their 
 difference. To inscribe pathology with the metaphorical structure of 
 myth was to strip the murderer of all idiosyncrasy, to make of him or her a 
 historical exemplar in a particular topology of violence. Such a classifica- 
 tory enterprise was also an attempt to advance a science of mind for social 
 ends, by means that — given the narrative structure of myth and meta¬ 
 phor-constituted an ineluctably literary form of analysis. 
 
 There is a real confidence both in Wertham’s and in Bok’s work, a sense 
 of some expected imminent order (if not utopia). That confidence is what 
 allows these two authors their generosity of spirit. Crime, for Curtis Bok, 
 is a “disease of civilization” and, like civilization itself, can be “studied” 
 and, while civilization can be “improved,” crime can be remedied by the 
 handmaiden of law: psychiatry. Both Bok and Wertham believe in the 
 concept of “incorrigibility” and give tacit (or, in Bok’s case, overt) support 
 to capital punishment. 9 It might perhaps require a bit (or a lot) of fine- 
 tuning by the expert, but nonetheless “the future of penology is treat¬ 
 ment.” 10 Unlike March and Motley, whose fictions positioned the author 
 tacitly (and falsely, as we shall see) outside the text, the professional exper¬ 
 tise of Dr. Fredric Wertham and Judge Curtis Bok tends to explode the 
 critical distance between author and subject, bringing the latter to heel as 
 part of a classificatoiy enterprise. The interest of these latter two authors in 
 murder, then, is explicit. It is not disinterested, the ethical vocation of the 
 expert notwithstanding. 
 
 The central sections of this book, Chapters Four, Five, and Six, detail 
 the progress of a particular “case” from the courtroom (in which the press 
 were restricted in the content of their reporting, if not in their access to 
 the trial) out into the canon of true crime and the cult crime film. The 
 anecdote with which I begin Chapter Four describes my meeting with 
 one of the principals in a murder case forty years old, and its tone gestures 
 toward some of the contrary impulses of identification and mystification 
 that exist at the heart of “true crime” literature that I deal with in the final 
 chapters of this book: the hope of the storyteller that nothing important 
 will be left out; the intoxication of researchers with the subjects they re¬ 
 create; the feeling that the “truth” is near at hand. Such a space of wonder 
 and affect is not one of revelation, but of mediation. 
 
 Introduction 7 
 
The tale of murder gains authority in the context of cultural readings 
 not always obliging or expected. The sensational case of the “Honey¬ 
 moon Killers” with which these central chapters deal was a cautionary 
 tale set not exclusively in the generic mold of the crime story, but as a 
 romance. Such culturally contingent readings also reveal more fundamen¬ 
 tal narrative structures of the tale of murder. The odd combination of 
 narrative stylings for the testimony of Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez 
 was not merely a matter of the news media’s hand in distributing the story. 
 The press was gagged, but the women attending every day of the trial 
 were not, pointing to one of the significant characteristics of murder 
 narrative — its informality. The professional media are not the only vehi¬ 
 cle for news and information. Gossip and speculation (and the ossified 
 form that embraces it, folklore) are the very lifeblood of the tale of mur¬ 
 der. As in the later film satirization of the case, the gallery audience was 
 filled with those women (middle-class and middle-aged housewives) most 
 likely to consume that quintessential literature of domesticity, the ro¬ 
 mance. “True” crime and “true” romance blended into a renegade genre 
 in the accounts of the “Hearts Killers,” even though Martha Beck herself 
 was bound not to measure up as a romantic subject. The press called her 
 “fat, dowdy Martha,” 11 and at one moment she pointedly (and rhetori¬ 
 cally) asked whether she was being “tried for murder, or because I’m 
 fat.” 12 Her body, her gender, and her sexuality were all subjected to an 
 intense scrutiny. And, make no mistake, Martha Beck became the central 
 figure in the case and in all incarnations of the story to follow because of 
 the intensity, and the nature, of that scrutiny. 
 
 The many versions of the story of the Hearts Killers revolve around 
 an indeterminate center, the assumed “truth” of the events. An authorita¬ 
 tive version of what happened (and its meaning) is arrived at not through 
 a narrative arranged to accommodate the “facts,” but from out of the 
 ungainly but remarkably resilient structure of the “backwards narrative”: 
 murder foretold through the unraveling of the murderer’s developing 
 psychosis. Narrative conventions in the tale of murder work on a system 
 of portent, of presque vu. The murder happens because of the murderer, 
 and yet there is no murderer until the murder. This paradox is the very 
 engine of narration in the tale of murder. 
 
 I have already indicated that the prediction of dangerousness relies 
 upon the classification of the murderer through analysis — an analysis that 
 
 8 Murder 
 
reauthors the act and its original author. The true crime genre as a whole 
 is similarly implicated in the reauthoring of its subject, even as its subject 
 exceeds the focal point of the narrative: the figure of the murderer. The 
 popularity of the pulp genre of true crime (in which the tale of murder 
 reigns supreme) can be taken as partial evidence of the importance of the 
 murder narrative in the American cultural consciousness. The conditions 
 of possibility for the true crime detective magazine and the forensic psy¬ 
 chiatrist’s report are obviously different, but the direction of meaning in 
 the tale of murder is governed by similar cultural impulses. The question 
 asked of murder by legal process is unusually narrow. The “How?” inves¬ 
 tigated in the trial becomes, even in the expert psychiatric testimony it 
 contains, the much more insistent “Why?” ruling the murder narrative. 
 The business of the murder narrative lies with the murderer ,; and with the 
 enigma of origins . 13 In true crime, as in other tales of murder, there is 
 the expectation that a definitive version waits, somewhere at the end of 
 the author/detective’s trail. Yet that authoritative version must remain, 
 mirage-like, on the horizon of the murder’s telling. The questions are 
 insistent, the answers elusive. 
 
 The true crime genre has its own topology of murder. Crimes can be 
 grouped by the criminological tag for the killer (lust or serial killers), by 
 the profession of the killer (doctors, police), by the age or gender of the 
 killers (kids who kill, women who kill), and by the relationship between 
 the killers or between killer and victim (couples who kill, children who 
 kill their parents, abused women who kill their husbands). These aggre¬ 
 gates repackage a finite number of sensational crimes and allow for their 
 recontextualization in the subgenre that describes them. The inflection is 
 significant, for established tales of murder —like that of the Honeymoon 
 Killers — change from category to category. The telling of the story of the 
 Hearts Killers as a true romance (analyzed in Chapter 4) will give rise to a 
 slightly different narrative from that of th efolie a deux (discussed in Chap¬ 
 ters 5 and 6), although both share elements of the romance. Regardless of 
 the framework, however, the tale is told to render “truth” from the great 
 mystery that is murder. 
 
 Chapter 6, the final piece in the section dealing with the Hearts Killers, 
 attends to the incarnation of their story in a film made in 1970 that was 
 to assume cult status. The dark satire of The Honeymoon Killers 14 is but 
 one example of a more general shift in the 1960s toward a “critical” 
 
 Introduction 9 
 
narrative form quite unlike the confident, authoritative narratives of such 
 liberal humanists as Fredric Wertham and Curtis Bok, or the social cri¬ 
 tiques of Willard Motley and William March. The political critique of 
 authority in the West, culminating (in Europe) in the upheavals of 1968, 
 had an impact also on philosophy, social criticism, the new journalism, 
 and literature. While “postmodernism” may be merely a marker in the 
 overall development of modernism during this century, the move toward 
 self-reflexive narrative has been a significant one in the past thirty years. 
 Thus the predominantly ethical, though prescriptive, concerns of writers 
 like Wertham and Bok give way to what might be seen as more complex, 
 and less certain, forms of narrative. The modern tales of murder dealt 
 with in the final three chapters of this book demonstrate, generally, not 
 just that “facts” are difficult and often spare, but that authority within and 
 without the text is inherently suspect. Narrative cohesion still demanded 
 the construction of authority within intelligible historical and cultural 
 horizons — but the horizon, and all it took in, had changed. 
 
 Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine deal with narratives of murder that 
 belong to an era where authority, within and without texts, is suspect. 
 These texts demonstrate a quite different set of allegiances and concerns 
 from those of the earlier works, and all of them try in some way to put the 
 killed back into the tale of murder. The work of James Baldwin on the 
 child murders in Atlanta and that of Kate Millett on the torture murder of 
 a teenage girl in suburban Middle America both refuse in different ways 
 the narrative impulses of an increasingly aestheticized discourse of mur¬ 
 der. 15 James Baldwin has written in The Evidence of Things Not Seen a 
 devastating critique of American racism. His analysis of the creation of a 
 single controversial “case” out of the so-called Atlanta Child Killings 
 demonstrates how the trial of Wayne Williams and his condemnation 
 elided the more pressing —and central — issues of racial ghettoization, 
 endemic poverty, and racism. Kate Millett, in her eloquent revisitation of 
 a murder scene, critiques the violent workings of patriarchal institutions 
 in capitalist America. Baldwin and Afillett hold in common a broad social 
 critique and a refusal, therefore, to make of the murderer a scapegoat. 
 And yet, the signal difference between the two works is their object: race, 
 on the one hand, and gender on the other. Although both accounts at¬ 
 tempt to deconstruct hierarchies of difference that are structurally en¬ 
 coded, their terms are pretty much mutually exclusive. 16 For this reason, I 
 
 10 Murder 
 
scrutinize the inscription of gender in Baldwin as well as Millett’s silence 
 about race. 
 
 The last chapter is, if you like, the return of the prodigal. It draws 
 together the earlier analyses by returning to the problem of the ability of 
 the tale of murder to fascinate. How and why does the figure of the 
 murderer become the focal point of mediation in narratives from the 
 earlier as well as the later period? What, finally, is it that compels people 
 to tell murder stories? (Which question must also become: What do they 
 listen for in such stories?) 
 
 For Willard Motley and William March, Dr. Fredric Wertham and 
 Judge Curtis Bok, the matter in writing about murder would seem to be 
 “I am doing this for. . . .” There is, after all, an end to all of this: a better 
 understanding of what poverty and lack of caring can inure the soul to, an 
 understanding of the nature of evil, of madness, of justice. For later 
 writers, like James Baldwin and Kate Millett, the question at the heart of 
 their tale is different: “Why did this happen — this way — to this man, this 
 child, this girl, this woman? How easily could this have happened to me?” 
 And that, perhaps, is what I must finally call a more “fitting” way of 
 writing about murder: a witnessing that identifies not with the fundamen¬ 
 tal fragility of all bodies confronted with violence, but with the greater 
 vulnerability of some who must confront the invulnerability, or blind 
 hurt, of others. The fragility of one’s own body is thus written into the 
 text, a figural space for the murdered to appear as something other than a 
 corpse, more substantial than a sign. 
 
 Introduction 11 
 

 
 
Kri I 
 
 TU KiiUrS 
 
 Other ’en killing, 
 
 I have been nice to everybody all my life. 
 
 Henry Lee Lucas 
 
i. Here There Be Killers 
 
 Things least to be believed are most preferred 
 All counterfeit as from truths sacred mint 
 Are readily believed if once put down in print. 
 
 John Clare , “St. Martin s Eve” 
 
 In 1866, early in that period of violent social change known as Recon¬ 
 struction, a paper carried in its column of curiosities a snippet of news 
 from Mobile, Alabama. In a vacant apartment a headless body had been 
 found. Accompanying the corpse was a note that read: “To prevent iden¬ 
 tification I have hidden my own head where you will never find it.” 1 This 
 anecdote is a perfect example of the conundrum of murder: the story of 
 the lively corpse or the blithe murderer. The report provides no resolu¬ 
 tion to the mystery, its wry brevity attesting to the publishers’ confidence 
 in a reader’s love of the paradoxical quality of the tale of murder —not 
 necessarily the more orderly satisfactions gained from the narrative of 
 crime, detection, apprehension, punishment, and redemption. By the 
 “lyrical fiction” of this particular “murderer’s song,” 2 the body in the 
 vacant room becomes at once murderer and victim: a sign of its own 
 disappearance. Any layperson knows that the best evidence of murder 
 (upon which to hang a prosecution, at any rate) is a corpse, yet the mod¬ 
 ern tale of murder turns attention away from the victim to the mur¬ 
 derer—the corpse becoming little more than a relic of another’s trans¬ 
 gression and transcendence. The metaphysics of modern murder makes 
 the victim a sign of the murderer. 3 
 
 The cultural resonance of the narrative of murder arises from its 
 uneasy position at the borderline of ethics and aesthetics. In a culture 
 wherein the communication and entertainment media are more varied 
 and accessible than ever before, the “fact” of murder and its representa- 
 
tions grow close indeed: “That murder is the most unrepresentable and 
 yet one of the most represented of acts in our culture points to the fact 
 that rather than take one out of discourse, murder ironically leads one 
 back into it, with a vengeance, to which the vast and ever-expanding 
 plethora of murder literature bears witness: horror stories, detective sto¬ 
 ries, criminological literature, video nasties, and so on.” 4 Murder as a 
 fundamental expression of immanence and abjection has a presence that 
 consumes the corpse of victim and murderer alike. And yet the visceral, 
 brute fact of murder is itself a false, or insufficient, foundation for narra¬ 
 tive. All that is given in the tale of murder is the corpse; everything else 
 remains to be found. 
 
 Murder belongs only partly to the juridical and penological realm, 
 where it becomes, in the discourses of the modern social sciences, a 
 “problem” effected by period and place, evidence of the changing rela¬ 
 tionships of power between classed, raced, and gendered actors. The 
 disciplines of sociology, criminology, penology, law and, not least of all, 
 forensic psychiatry have traditionally laid claim to scientific status (with 
 the exception of the law, for which quite other truth claims are made). 5 
 The positivistic assumptions at the root of the development of these 
 disciplines are quintessentially ethical and implicitly political. 6 The quest 
 for topology and classification that underpins the disciplines of criminol¬ 
 ogy, penology, and psychiatry can exist only on a discursive landscape 
 against which the “discovered” object can have its form defined and its 
 shadow cast. Every psychological classification for the “insane” mur¬ 
 derer; every analysis of the degree or gravity of the crime; every determi¬ 
 nation on gradation, technique, or site of punishment for murder; and 
 every study of the environmental milieu of the violent individual makes a 
 decision about the meaning of murder: its origins, its impact, its “nature.” 
 
 The crime story is a critically significant narrative frame in modern 
 Western culture — whether the scripted broadsheet “confessions” of the 
 murderer on the scaffold in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, 
 or the compendium of sensational trials in the Ordinary of Newgate 
 Account, or the detective fiction of Poe, Dickens and (later) Hammett, 
 Chandler, and Spillane. 7 The true crime genre that has enjoyed an un¬ 
 surprising renaissance since the 1940s (and not only in the United States) 
 is the direct descendant of a genre of crime reporting that treats the 
 
 16 Murder 
 
“facts” at issue as a good deal less important than the narrative rules of 
 the genre. 
 
 Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there could not 
 be said to be a clear demarcation between a high and low literature of 
 crime, nor between the stories of actual and fictional murder. Thackeray 
 satirized the style of the Newgate Chronicle , and Henry Fielding, in Jona¬ 
 than Wild , drew on the Chronicle for a panoply of characters and crimes. 
 The vogue of the crime story by the mid-nineteenth century should not 
 be underestimated. What contemporaries perceived as the degenerative 
 horrors of urban culture were enthusiastically chronicled from the 1860s 
 in both Britain and the United States. 8 By the later nineteenth century, 
 eugenic thought — haunted by the spectre of the “born” criminal and 
 atavistic degeneration — existed side by side with more progressive social 
 analyses of violence. As the century waned, the tale of murder as fact or 
 fiction moved progressively further from its description of the murderous 
 act to an analysis of the murderer. 
 
 Between the early part of the nineteenth century and its apogee, the 
 murderer grew in stature; the meaning of murder, its metaphysics, was no 
 longer evident in the event but in its main actor. That discursive shift 
 belongs to a more general historical process within which the individual 
 subject grew more complex, and more affecting: the subject a synecdoche 
 for the greater social “whole.” As part of that epistemological shift inward 
 from the world to the soul and psyche of the subject, the “murderer” was 
 invented — along with (and, often, part and parcel of) the “hysteric,” the 
 “homosexual,” the “adolescent,” the “criminal,” and the “psychotic.” 
 
 In the following chapters I will be examining both the representation of 
 actual murder and murder in fiction. By dismantling various narratives of 
 murder it will become possible to expose the cultural meaning given to 
 murder, that irreplaceable taken-for-granted quality of a murder that, 
 when narrated, says so much about what a culture knows and what it will not 
 let itself know. While this work is in part a general analysis of the compel¬ 
 ling quality of murder narratives in the West, it is also an investigation of 
 the interestedness of modern and contemporary American culture in the 
 tale of murder. Americans consume murder as a daily fare, sometimes — 
 during the trial of O. J. Simpson, for instance — to the point of bilious¬ 
 ness. Most states have legislation allowing trials to be televised whole or 
 
 Here There Be Killers 17 
 
in part, and an adept channel surfer can always find a murder covered in 
 detail: on the news; in “true crime” miniseries; in the urban folklore of 
 programs like Unexplained Mysteries; in the tabloid format of disaster and 
 police work series; and, of course, on twenty-four hours a day of Court 
 T. V. Television talk-show hosts regularly address the topic, programming 
 fatal violence along with more banal, folksy wisdom on the control of 
 weight, excess or insufficient body hair, and relations with one’s in-laws. 
 How can one not be riveted by Oprah Winfrey’s tongue-in-cheek ques¬ 
 tioning of a woman deeply smitten by the younger of the Menendez 
 brothers, a man she knows only from a miniseries, from news and Court 
 T.V.? Oprah on “Woman in Love with Serial Killers,” or Donahue railing 
 at the National Rifle Association, or Sally Jesse Raphael on adolescent 
 drug use, all have in common their reference to a popular understanding 
 of how violence is lived in contemporary America. To say that Americans 
 have an interest in murder is to use “interest” both as a noun and a 
 transitive verb, to show “curiosity” and “concern, affect, and relation to,” 
 to signify the “personal” and “public.” It is to show the implication of the 
 curious in the object of their curiosity. And yet that “interest” is not a 
 unitary one, shared by one and all in a unified, undifferentiated culture. 
 “Cultural interestedness” is a general term that embraces a varied set of 
 local effects, as evidenced, say, by the difference between pro- and anti¬ 
 death-penalty lobby groups (not to mention the difference of both of 
 these again from the people most likely to find themselves on death row). 
 
 Michel Foucault has observed that the relationship of power to death in 
 modern democratic societies is, in appearance, benevolent or, at least, 
 passive. It may “ foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” 9 The main 
 business of technologized power is to maintain and extend life, and that 
 preoccupation has been accompanied by a kind of “occulting” of death. 
 Death is sequestered in modern Western culture, becoming private in its 
 actuality yet increasingly public as representation. Death, like power, has 
 become dispersed. It is everywhere and nowhere. In a culture that has 
 located so much meaning in self-identity, in individuality and in the body 
 as “person,” 10 it should not be surprising that it is the psyche of the 
 criminal, rather than the crime itself, that fascinates. Death takes up 
 residence in the figure of the murderer. Execution — killing the killer — is 
 contrived to exorcise the presence of death, but such a presence cannot be 
 exorcised (for where can death go?). Death is a symptom, and, like the 
 
 18 Murder 
 
symptom in psychoanalytic practice, it is all there effectively is — the limit 
 and extent of meaning, yet a limit that points beyond itself (What is 
 death?). Execution, as the last great secular ritual surrounding death in 
 American culture, is still important, if not critical, to that culture’s sense 
 of its own life. 
 
 The last chapter of this book will deal more closely with the question of 
 execution and with the stature of the murderer as death’s “agent” in 
 contemporary American culture. That discussion demands an analysis of 
 one of the most recent, and exemplary, works on the place of murder in 
 American culture: Wendy Lesser’s Pictures at an Execution. Two earlier 
 critical works also deserve attention, for despite their quite different pre¬ 
 occupations with murder in (or as) literature, both David Brion Davis and 
 Joel Black provide ample evidence of the cultural importance of the 
 murder narrative. 11 The differences between the two texts suggest the 
 historical contingency and particularity of the tale of murder. Davis’s is a 
 liberal text produced during the Cold War, one concerned with the social 
 values exposed by American literary accounts of murder from the Revolu¬ 
 tion to the Civil War, and Black’s a “postmodern” account that ranges 
 through the fiction of four languages and two countries to arrive at an 
 analysis of “hyperrealized violence” in contemporary American culture. 
 Both works are motivated by presentist and manifestly “social” concerns, 
 notwithstanding their historical, comparative, and more or less “literary” 
 subjects. Both works treat, in different ways, a familiar question: How 
 does an individual act of violence relate to the culture that gives rise to it, 
 and how is that act of one (the murdering individual) owned by the com¬ 
 munity of others? Davis’s work addresses this conundrum as a question of 
 “social values.” Black, on the other hand, considers the interchange be¬ 
 tween representation and “reality” and, in choosing to study simulta¬ 
 neously fictional texts and sensational cases, opts for an interrogation of 
 the aesthetic approach to murder. 12 The problem of murder that looms 
 large for Davis is the problem of a society that gave birth to the collective 
 domestic homicide called the Civil War. His is not a simplistic conception 
 of the “mind” of society (in the form of its “imagination”), for he does 
 recognize the unpredictable and contradictory nature of the symbolic 
 level of his texts. But the movement of meaning remains one-way: killings 
 stay in the world and are mimicked in texts; the texts themselves are never 
 murderous. 
 
 Here There Be Killers 19 
 
In the prosperous but still ideologically troubled United States of the 
 mid-1950s it is not surprising to find Davis arguing that a study of the 
 literary treatment of murder should “elucidate more general problems in 
 American civilization.” His aim is to establish a kind of intellectual his¬ 
 tory of both American aggression and the sanctions against it; to explain 
 the contradictory nature of a “sparkling, smiling, domestic land ... where 
 it is estimated that a new murder occurs every forty-five minutes.” 13 Yet 
 Davis’s attention to a discretely American culture of violence makes his 
 concern no less universal than an examination of the extent and range of 
 reasons put forward for mankind’s “extraordinary capacity to kill.” By 
 examining the reasoning, reflective, and mimetic art of literature, Davis 
 strives to produce an empiricist account of murder’s reason. 14 Signifi¬ 
 cantly, this account of reason becomes, by its own critical strategies, an 
 inescapably gendered one. 
 
 As part of his discussion of the triumph of the tale of seduction, Davis 
 analyzes a notorious homicide in New York in 1836. James Gordon Ben¬ 
 nett provided extensive and detailed reporting for the New York Herald 
 concerning the murder of Helen Jewett, a cultured and successful pros¬ 
 titute, by a disgruntled client, Richard Robinson. Jewett was axed and 
 then, in a failed attempt by the murderer to dispose of the evidence, her 
 body was slightly burned. Despite the brutality of the murder, Bennett 
 dwelt at length upon the beauty of the corpse: 
 
 The body looked as white, as full, as polished as the purest Parian marble. The 
 perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, 
 all surpassed, in every respect, the Venus de Medici.... For a few moments I was 
 lost in admiration of the extraordinary sight, a beautiful female corpse, that sur¬ 
 passed the finest statue in antiquity. I was recalled to her horrid destiny by seeing 
 the dreadful bloody gashes on the right temple. IS 
 
 Although “recalled to her horrid destiny,” Bennett goes on to enumerate 
 the other accomplishments of the victim, now a corpse. Davis describes 
 Bennett’s minute attention to Jewett’s rooms —from the furnishings and 
 the titles of the books on her shelves to the beautiful penmanship and 
 delicate turn of phrase of her private letters. The scene of death in this 
 way becomes an extension of the “beautiful female corpse.” In his discus¬ 
 sion of the Jewett case and its successive mediators — from Bennett and 
 H. R. Howard 16 through to the fictional study of the Jewett case by 
 
 20 Murder 
 
Joseph Holt Ingraham 17 —Davis shows the shift of emphasis, enacted 
 through the aestheticization of the corpse, from the victim to the mur¬ 
 derer: a naive boy beguiled by the harlot’s accomplishment and beauty. 18 
 An excess of stimulation deranges the murderer’s previously controlled 
 passions. The reversed tale of seduction, in which female corruption 
 dislodges male reason and is thereby punished, vindicates the murderer 
 while banishing the victim to the borders of the moral frame. In Bennett’s 
 early “true crime” narrative, an ugly act —the outcome of two degraded 
 lives in collision — begets a scene of “beauty.” 19 
 
 Recent scholarship on the tropic relationship of femininity and death 
 in Western culture suggests that the feminine partakes of much of death’s 
 “allusive” qualities: its “unrepresentability” as well as its immanence. 
 Death, like femininity, is both “limit and excess.” 20 While Death is no¬ 
 where , Woman is simply not. As Sarah Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen 
 put it, “[Ojur culture posits death and the feminine as what is radically 
 other to the norm, the living or surviving masculine subject; they repre¬ 
 sent the disruption and difference that ground a narcissistic sense of 
 self.” 21 While an analysis of the allegorical relationship of Woman and 
 Death is a fascinating project in and of itself, what most concerns me here 
 is the insight that relationship provides to a reading of certain historically 
 contingent tales of murder. If, as Goodwin and Bronfen point out, “femi¬ 
 ninity and death are Western culture’s two major tropes for the enigma,” 
 then women would seem to be killed (both in and out of texts) not be¬ 
 cause they are dispensable objects, but because they are indispensable. To 
 put it another way, the instability of the category of the Feminine is essen¬ 
 tial to the maintenance of an illusory stability of the Masculine. In con¬ 
 crete terms this perhaps means that Woman (as sign and substance?) is in¬ 
 dispensably dispensableP The ineluctable symbolic quality that attends the 
 flesh made feminine is part and parcel of the murder narrative, because — 
 in a sense —where Death appears so too must the Feminine. The gen¬ 
 dered tropic strategy of the tale of murder appears in and around the 
 interrogation of the murder’s origin in the murderer’s psyche. It appears 
 in the discussion of the victim’s sexuality, class, and race, all categories 
 which are themselves coded by the pathologizing of the murderer into 
 the idiosyncratic rather than the social: “character,” “predisposition,” or 
 “environment.” The following work is, if you like, a way to return the 
 idiosyncrasy of violence to the context of its culture. The act of narrating 
 
 Here There Be Killers 21 
 
murder, for all its drive to make that act an aberration, and its actor 
 pathological, makes murder culturally intelligible by reference to things 
 known: that which is taken for granted, everyday, familiar, and common to 
 all. Murder is part of an everyday grammar, its mark acute, but final only 
 for the one killed. 
 
 The conjunction of femininity and death is clearly visible in David 
 Brion Davis’s erudite study Homicide in American Fiction. Although much 
 of Davis’s work deals in depth with changing perceptions of homicidal 
 “madness” throughout the nineteenth century, 23 his concentration on the 
 popularity 7 of the tale of seduction in the second half of that century leads 
 him toward a critique of the representation of women in such texts. In the 
 sentimental tale that Davis analyzes, Woman primarily represented what 
 she could bestow upon or take from a man — whether that be land, family, 
 love, fidelity or, ultimately, his reason. Woman, in turn, could have her 
 own moral soul (writers less readily spoke of lost reason for women) 
 destroyed by seduction. The final blame for that fall, however, did not lie 
 with the seducer but with the seduced who allows her own “murder.” 24 
 Like Guy River’s mother, that “weakly fond, misjudging woman who 
 gave me birth” whom River blamed for his own murderousness, a woman 
 could also be held responsible for the dead moral sense of her murdering 
 son. Largely, then, women could be seen to be both the source and the 
 arena of corruption. As such, Woman became the representation of 
 nightmare, not of reason. In the discourse of murder, sex is Woman and 
 sex is Death: therefore, Woman too is Death. 
 
 As a historian, Davis is careful to contextualize the symbolic use of 
 Woman as transcendent figure, yet his contextualization (male fears de¬ 
 rived from a change in the status of women) tends itself to reinstate 
 Woman as the object of a male historical subject —whether he be an 
 author or the gendered generic of “American society.” Discussing the pre¬ 
 occupation of nineteenth-century authors with the destabilizing power of 
 sex, Davis notes that “nothing was so common in popular fiction as the 
 hero who struggled simultaneously for his father’s estate and for his hero¬ 
 ine’s hand. Sexual conflict could symbolize all conflict between human 
 egos, every contest between men for possession and power.” 25 In this way 
 Davis not only describes the predilection of popular writers for the use of 
 Woman as symbolic prize, but he is himself excluding her from the discur¬ 
 sive realm of competition. 
 
 2 2 Murder 
 
Commenting on the growing obsession in the popular fiction of the 
 1840s with the evil in Woman, Davis provides what could be read either 
 as his historicization of that hostility and fear or his own theory as to its 
 cause: 
 
 De Tocqueville shared the view of many foreign travellers that Americans were 
 unique in their respect and admiration for women. It was also true, however, that 
 many American men were unhappy over the extreme idealization of the fair sex, 
 which inevitably brought restrictions for men. Sentimental writers might glorify 
 motherhood, but mothers also exercised more power in America than in most 
 other countries. 26 
 
 Davis here works within — rather than opposing — the discursive frame of 
 a secular idealization of Woman. When he goes on to discuss the dualistic 
 character of Woman in nineteenth-century fiction, he is therefore able 
 only to deal with the increased ability of men to discriminate between 
 “various feminine stereotypes.” 27 At issue is the use to which Woman is 
 put as symbol, but not her wholesale status as symbol. In Davis’s exposi¬ 
 tion, as in the texts he analyzes, symbolic Woman becomes a lesson in the 
 social values of a society-gendered male. By reinscribing the symbolic 
 strategy of sentimental literature as part of an ethical discourse on mur¬ 
 der, Davis produces a gendered discourse of murder in which Woman 
 becomes both the ethical agent of her own destruction and the aesthetic 
 object of that destruction. The beauty of the female corpse that so hypno¬ 
 tized James Gordon Bennett comes both from the aura of exemplarity in 
 the female victim (she who is by her very sex corrupt but whose perfect 
 corpse resists, momentarily, corporeal corruption) and from vestigial 
 traces of the murderer’s presence left on the body, a presence impressed, 
 by quite another aura, upon the scene of the murder itself. Because 
 Robinson has killed her, his presence cannot be excised from the scene; 
 Bennett, the observer, stands in for the murderer who has fled. It is 
 Bennett who, in contemplating the corpse, is “recalled to her horrid 
 destiny” — like the murderer who suddenly realizes what he has done. 
 
 The dark renown of the murderer, and, indeed, the “beauty” of his act, 
 is eloquently explored in the framing of the narrative of a nineteenth- 
 century French parricide by a research group at the College de France. 
 Michel Foucault, with his colleagues, explained their reasons for not 
 interpreting the lengthy confession of Pierre Riviere: “[ 0 ]wing to a sort 
 
 Here There Be Killers 2 3 
 
of reverence and perhaps, too, terror for a text which was to carry off 
 four corpses along with it, we were unwilling to superimpose our own text 
 on Riviere’s memoir. We fell under the spell of the parricide with the 
 reddish-brown eyes.” Elsewhere Foucault declares that “its beauty alone 
 is sufficient justification” for reprinting the murderer’s text. 28 The song of 
 the peasant murderer is —for the College de France group —such an 
 unlikely sound, such a rarity, that they cannot bear to provide a new 
 arrangement for its startling score. The text of the confession is beautiful 
 because surprising that it ever was articulated at all, and the act —of 
 which the confession is but a part —can therefore be viewed as one of 
 rebellion. 21 ' By virtue of the “murderer’s song” to which they so intently 
 listen, the College de France scholars become witnesses to a crime that 
 initially had no witnesses but the murderer. In taking up his text, they are 
 converted to an audience as the crime plays out again before them. 
 
 “Murder,” wrote W. H. Auden, “is unique in that it abolishes the party 
 it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his 
 behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in 
 which society has a direct interest.” 30 His definition of that “uniqueness” 
 was founded upon a qualification of the antisocial nature of the crime, yet 
 that moral response can also be read as having implications for an aes¬ 
 thetics of murder. What, for instance, might be a phenomenology of 
 murder when the only subject is the witness to the crime and the mur¬ 
 derer? 31 If “murder abolishes the party it injures,” this must indeed be the 
 result, and society’s “direct interest” should be seen not only as ethical 
 and punitive, but as aesthetic. 
 
 Explaining the notion of the aesthetic response, Joel Black writes: 
 
 [A]ny object or idea may be experienced or interpreted by a beholder (or witness, 
 in the case of someone who is present at an event or an act) as a work of art — 
 again, according to whatever the beholder’s definition of “art” may be.... [Such a 
 response] refers exclusively to the beholder’s subjective experience, regardless of 
 whether or not the object of this experience was intended as a work of art or 
 designed for the beholder’s aesthetic enjoyment. 
 
 The theory of aesthetics developed by the Romantics took account of 
 “painful as well as pleasurable perceptions” — not least of which was fear. 
 Terror, or the spectre of terror, was thought to have a more powerful 
 effect than pleasure. Black’s explication of this theory of the dark sublime 
 
 24 Murder 
 
hinges upon his revisionist analysis of Thomas De Quincey’s essays on 
 murder. Black argues that De Quincey’s “aesthetics of murder” was an 
 attack upon the “rational, bourgeois ideology of detective fiction” that 
 parades as an ethical literature of murder. De Quincey, therefore, fore¬ 
 shadowed modern works within which 
 
 the classical idea of mimesis —the view that art is in some sense an imitation of 
 nature or a representation of reality —is subverted to the point where being and 
 appearance, ethics and aesthetics, are no longer distinguishable, but have become 
 virtual simulacra of each other. 32 
 
 Jean Baudrillard’s epigraph to Simulations defines the simulacrum as 
 “never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that 
 there is none. The simulacrum is true.” 33 If the mimetic collapses into the 
 “real,” we all become, somehow, witnesses to murder in a culture of pure 
 spectacle. The dark sublime of terror becomes a tool both for the mur¬ 
 derer’s performance and for the performance of murder. In the former 
 case, Black provides the example of the “serial killer” 34 who is given a 
 media fanfare that greatly enhances his murderous prestige, his ability to 
 horrify and, ultimately, his desire to kill. 35 The latter case describes the 
 ability of writers and filmmakers to “play on the fantasies and fears of 
 their mass audiences . . . profoundly aware of the effect their actions will 
 have on their enthralled spectators.” 36 
 
 Death fascinates. Although the circulation of images of murder is 
 controlled and the television media follow certain guidelines of public 
 “taste” —shielding the public from some of the most abject scenes cap¬ 
 tured by the news teams — those images of feigned violence proliferate, 
 providing the means by which violence, as Black puts it, is hyperrealized: 
 
 Officially, the act of taking another person’s life, either as crime or punishment, 
 can be represented only as an artistic fiction or simulation. In this guise, murder is 
 no longer a social reality; it has been neutralized and tamed as a supposedly 
 harmless form of popular entertainment. 37 
 
 Feminist critics of pornography, among others, have argued that images 
 of sexual violence directly affect the incidence of actual violence on 
 women. 38 However, no causal link has been firmly established, and the 
 meaning of the correlation between representations of violence and ac¬ 
 tual acts of violence is still hotly debated. 39 That relation can be seen 
 
 Here There Be Killers 2 5 
 
either as a quantitative or a qualitative one —or, indeed, it may be both. 
 Commonly, those who theorize about the negative effects of media vio¬ 
 lence see its representation as increasing the incidence of actual acts of 
 violence by making it easier for offenders to objectify their potential 
 victims —to make them “unreal” and, therefore, disposable. Another ar¬ 
 gument suggests that murders represented sensationally are an invitation 
 to copycat crime. More often than not, such killings are the reenactment 
 of an already reenacted crime. 40 Both scenarios are, in a sense, largely 
 quantitative: they increase the chances that a murder will be committed. 
 A qualitative correlation, though, implies a more subtle relation of the 
 image to the act. Discussing the example of the pornography and censor¬ 
 ship debates in the context of the United States, Ian Hacking presents 
 one possible way to tease out the complicated nature of the “qualitative” 
 relationship of representation to actual violence: 
 
 Pornography of the vilest and most sadistic sort, it is argued, invites imitation. 
 The evidence for this claim is poor, but it may be the wrong claim to examine 
 closely. The real evil may lurk one stage higher up. Distributing pornography is 
 distributing knowledge of new kinds of action . . . [increasing] . . . the range of 
 possible demeaning actions. 41 
 
 While this is perhaps an instrumental view, not so different in fact from a 
 feminist critique that treats pornography as a blueprint for the misogynist 
 objectification of women, Hacking concludes his discussion in a more 
 problematizing, and Foucauldian, way. The “new modes of action, new 
 descriptions, verbal or visual,” do not merely give rise to implementation 
 by the ill-meaning, but to a whole “looping effect of human kinds.” The 
 category of the “wicked” expands to contain both new actions and new 
 categories of wicked persons — to embrace types of “wickedness,” and new 
 processes and classifications to contain that wickedness. In short, a com¬ 
 plete and complex ascription of meaning to the violent, to crime, to the 
 “criminal.” 
 
 Joel Black is rather more long-winded in his explication of the “hyper¬ 
 realization” of violence evidenced by the media-motivated assassination 
 of John Lennon by David Chapman and the attempted assassination of 
 Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley. Black refuses the simplistic notion that 
 the killers merely wanted to “realize” the novel or film obsessing them. 42 
 Rather than argue that Hinckley and Chapman were psycho- or socio- 
 
 26 Murder 
 
paths who mistook “fantasy for reality, fiction for fact, art for action,” 
 Black proposes that they should be seen as “supreme literalists” who tried 
 to see the world (“where violence is routinely sublimated into art”) as it 
 “really” is, “in all its unsublimated, sublime violence”: 
 
 Artistic representations of slayings provide fictional displacements or simulacra of 
 the act of murder for everyone except the artistically illiterate. Such persons are 
 unable to recognize art as art, not simply because they live in a world of make- 
 believe fantasy . . . but because they are absolute Realists who find no truth or 
 meaning whatsoever either in their own private fantasies (the Imaginary) or in the 
 collective fantasies of art and the media (the Symbolic). 43 
 
 The artistic illiterate, essentially blind to the aesthetics of murder (in the 
 sense of its “routine sublimation into art”), resorts to a dangerous ethics 
 of murder as “a code or principle of action.” 44 Black describes not a 
 confusion of art for the real, but a supreme realism that banishes the 
 “unreal” altogether. 
 
 There are other, more interesting, ways of looking at the qualitative 
 relationship between representations of violence and actual violence. Bill 
 Ellis, investigating the connection between urban horror folklore 45 and 
 certain incidences of animal mutilation and murder, theorizes the exis¬ 
 tence of several modes of “ostension” — the conversion of narrative, or 
 the legendary, into fact. Ellis reminds us that the definition of the legend¬ 
 ary should be kept as broad as possible, that legends are “normative 
 definitions of reality, maps by which one can determine what has hap¬ 
 pened, what is happening, and what will happen.” 46 Legends are both 
 descriptive and prescriptive narratives. 
 
 Ellis develops his analysis of ostension in a discussion of a satanist scare 
 sparked by the discovery of certain “inexplicable” animal mutilations in 
 the rural heartland of America, suggesting that the people thereabouts 
 tended to interpret evidence in the light of existent narrative forms. Cat¬ 
 tle mutilations, dismissed by the fbi as the work of foxes, presented to 
 other eyes the work of “cults” long believed to exist —if quiescent —in 
 the area. This act of interpretation Ellis designates as “quasi-ostension.” 
 “Pseudo-ostension” also seems likely to have played a role in the Texas 
 satanist panic when practical jokers arranged unholy shrines or dismem¬ 
 bered the already dead carcasses of animals to imitate a sacrificial scene. 
 Pseudo-ostension was therefore defined as “imitating the outlines of a 
 
 Here There Be Killers 27 
 
known narrative to perpetuate a hoax.” 47 A third variety of ostension 
 identified by Ellis has remarkable resonance with Black’s analysis of an 
 aberrant ethics of murder. “True ostension” involves not only taking the 
 legend at face value, but writing oneself into it: in this case, actually 
 sacrificing animals or even humans in order to “raise a spirit.” 48 Such a 
 version of murder as performance is quite different from the common 
 understanding of copycat killings, for it involves the annexation of legend 
 as positive action. The narrative frame to an act of literal ostension only 
 makes easier the inversion of “reality.” If someone kills two teenagers as a 
 sacrifice to demons, then that person is acting upon a version of the world 
 in which demons exist. If, wTen the crime becomes known, the commu¬ 
 nity attributes it to satanists (in the face of a more rational alternative), 
 then the wider frame for that murderous act is, epistemologically speak¬ 
 ing, in agreement with it. “Legends about Satanic murder and mutilation 
 are not just expressions of fictive horror, they are paradigms for making 
 the world more horrifying.” 49 
 
 Ellis’s analysis of ostension is in some ways a more subtle sketch of the 
 interrelationship of representation and reality than is Black’s, for all the 
 sophistication of the concept of those “supreme literalists” of violence. 
 Yet Ellis and Black both describe cultural mechanisms (legend and media, 
 respectively) that create the terms by which “reality” can be actively 
 interpreted — can, in effect, be made. 50 
 
 28 Murder 
 
2. Parens Patriae 
 
 The depravity of mankind is so easily discoverable that nothing 
 but the desert or the cell can exclude it from notice. 
 
 Samuel Johnson 
 
 The problem and origin of evil looms large in Willard Motley’s naturalis¬ 
 tic fiction and William March’s novelistic study of psychopathology in 
 the making. Motley and March present apparendy polarized conceptions 
 of murder’s genesis: culture on one hand, and bestial nature on the other. 
 To get to the bottom of the matter and to argue a case, both writers stray 
 out of the fictive into the realm of fact, of evidence — of sociological and 
 criminological models. Taken in tandem, Motley’s Knock on Any Door and 
 March’s The Bad Seed demonstrate the developing relationship of the 
 critical crime novel with true-crime, as well as a more broadly ‘sociologi¬ 
 cal’ scholarship. Willard Modey explores the corruption and inequity of 
 juvenile detention systems, and William March the unforeseen results of 
 adoption in a world of inherited traits (or, in this case, “taints”). Modey’s 
 critique seems, initially, to be directed at the social realm, while the latter 
 focuses on the micro, individual, or domestic level. Both texts work in 
 reference to theories of degeneration, although March wavers toward a 
 belief in “innate depravity.” 1 Modey’s Knock on Any Door follows the 
 materialist and naturalistic turn of Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, 2 
 and March’s The Bad Seed deals explicitly with the issue of genetics, enun¬ 
 ciating a quasi-Lombrosian theory of degeneration. 3 The idea of degen¬ 
 eration can turn in more or less deterministic ways, its effects apocalyptic 
 or merely of the moment. I would like to detour from an analysis of 
 degeneration at the level of the race or nation (or, in Foucauldian terms, 
 the “species body”) to examine these texts at the level of their approach to 
 
the individual body. 4 To elide the “species body” is not, however, to lose 
 sight of it altogether, for both of these works provide a unique oppor¬ 
 tunity to look at that which unites the species body with the individual 
 body: the discourse of sex, the “deployment of sexuality.” 5 It is not just 
 the construction of “deviancy” that joins the discourse of sex with that of 
 the criminal, but also the practice of confession, the power of truth in the 
 revelatory secret, the soul exposed through the body’s penance. 
 
 Foucault writes in volume one of his History of Sexuality that 
 
 we . . . are in a society of “sex,” or rather a society “with a sexuality”: the mecha¬ 
 nisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to 
 what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for 
 being used. Through the themes of health, progeny, race, the future of the spe¬ 
 cies, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality; the 
 latter was not a mark or a symbol, it was an object and a target. 6 
 
 Both of these novels are, if you like, “saturated” with sex, if sex is under¬ 
 stood in this way. The “four great strategic unities” that Foucault identi¬ 
 fies as the “specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on 
 sex” provide a useful discursive horizon for both texts. 7 Nick, the angelic 
 altar boy turned criminal, who is the protagonist of Motley’s novel, regis¬ 
 ters his dissolution at the sexual level and at the level of his masculinity. 
 Christine, who mothers a monster (and, in turn, discovers she was moth¬ 
 ered by one), is the subject focus for a constellation of doubts about what 
 Foucault calls the “biological-moral responsibility” of the Mother. The 
 figure of Rhoda, the “bad seed,” marks another set of related anxieties 
 about a “precociousness” that, while not overdy sexual, must partake of 
 the sexual by virtue of a general quandary about her “adult-like” qualities, 
 as well as her position as the object of desire of the adult, LeRoy. Rhoda 
 can fruitfully be read as a “ ‘preliminary’ sexual being, on this side of sex, 
 yet within it, astride a dangerous dividing line.” 8 
 
 The ubiquity of violence and its endemic nature are core concerns in 
 both works. Although Motley’s novel is by far the bleaker —describing a 
 society 7 massively abusing and disfiguring its citizens — March, on balance, 
 paints the most irredeemable picture: evil exists as an essential but random 
 force in human nature. Evil essentialized means not that murder will out , 
 but that it may not. Worse still, genocide and the full panoply of human- 
 
 30 Murder 
 
kind’s supposed “inhumanities” would then seem as natural (though spas¬ 
 modic) in their incidence as earth tremors in the California basin. 
 
 Suffer the Children 
 
 Although Willard Motley’s work was published in the late 1940s and 
 found an audience sufficient and sympathetic enough to warrant its con¬ 
 version into a film in 1949, the novel was written in the early years of the 
 war. 9 Its fidelity to the then declining naturalistic genre should not be too 
 surprising in an era still haunted by the Great Depression and the social 
 consciousness of the Popular Front era. The novel warrants inclusion 
 here because its themes found a receptive audience in a changed America 
 of the late 1940s and early 1950s. 10 Motley, an African American writer 
 who was accused by some of his contemporaries of ignoring the central 
 issue of race in his work, consistently claimed that his concern was the 
 “human race.” The broad focus of his work reflects that sensibility and his 
 commitment to write of lives that he — brought up in a middle-class black 
 family in a comfortable white neighborhood — had only lately come to 
 know. Motley chose the life which others, during the depression, had no 
 hope of avoiding and he was jailed for vagrancy. Struck by the very or¬ 
 dinariness of the people he met in jail, he took the cause of their criminal¬ 
 ization by society as his own. 11 
 
 The most interesting aspects of Knock on Any Door are thematic and 
 symbolic. Certainly the violence done to Nick, the young protagonist, is 
 more of a moral focus to the novel than the violence he actually enacts , and 
 in that sense Motley’s novel is closer to Wright’s Native Son than to 
 Dreiser’s An American Tragedy . 12 Yet the distinctiveness of Motley’s novel 
 comes from its sexual and gender coding of the poverty and brutality that 
 makes a killer of Nick. Nick is not taunted by the apparent accessibility of 
 the American Dream, as Clyde Griffiths was, nor is he completely ex¬ 
 cluded from it as was Bigger Thomas. Nick, the angel-faced altar boy, is 
 momentarily an emblem of the American Dream. But the boy who was so 
 good that he’d “go straight to heaven” if he died unfortunately lives, and 
 he endures a world so remote from heaven that it belies the goodness 
 supposedly severing the saved from the damned. That goodness is wholly 
 
 Parens Patriae 31 
 
reliant upon the condition of its expression, a reservation that signals 
 Motley’s refusal to entertain the idea of humankind’s essential goodness. 
 Aunt Rosa’s hopeful assessment that “there’s something good in every¬ 
 body” only underlines this, for even she admits the crucial proviso that 
 people “don’t do no wrong . .. when they're left alone [italics mine].” 13 But 
 they are not left alone. 
 
 There is a bewildering amount of description of male beauty in Mot¬ 
 ley’s novel. Initially, in his “innocence,” Nick is unconscious of his good 
 looks. His awakening to his own beauty precedes his discovery of its uses 
 (a discovery that coincides with the revelation of sexual desire). Nick first 
 perceives the virility of beauty through the lens of his attraction to Rocky, 
 a fellow Borstal boy. Rocky is Nick’s first mirror, reflecting a panoply 
 of desires. Nick desires Rocky’s assurance and swagger, and his free¬ 
 dom. The sign of that freedom is itself physically manifest in the names 
 pinched into the skins of the gang members. Nick progressively steps into 
 the space of these most wonderful and strong bodies around him: he beats 
 Bricktop, the reformatory’s champion fighter, and befriends Allen (an 
 African American youth shunned by the other inmates), becoming — 
 spiritually and physically —“Champ of the Hill.” He steps into Rocky’s 
 place when the other has gone, adopting his swagger and his gang. 
 
 These figures, Nick’s surrogates, represent an illusory masculinity that 
 Nick adopts as his own, with disastrous results. Degraded “manhood” is 
 certainly not an unfamiliar theme in the naturalistic novel, occurring in 
 different ways in both An American Tragedy and Native Son. It was a theme 
 of great concern to Motley, one that he coded quite differently from his 
 peers Richard Wright and James Baldwin. 14 In Ktiock on Any Door the 
 issue of “manhood” becomes a meditation upon sexual corruption and 
 the liminal space of adolescence. Nick’s is an “arrested” manhood, tied to 
 the trauma of his brutalization as a boy in the reformatory, and tied, by 
 the very concept of trauma itself, 15 to the permanently fragile, threatened 
 yet threatening, state of childhood. 16 Theodore Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths 
 grows to physical maturity, but retains a peculiarly adolescent naivete. He 
 is unable to find a model with integrity among the overwhelming array of 
 dream figures confronting him. By attempting to move out of his class 
 without fully understanding the meaning of class, Clyde demonstrates 
 that he is beguiled by the image of American society. He mirrors the sur¬ 
 face of those images confronting him, never piercing the reality' beneath. 
 
 32 Murder 
 
There lies the source of his fundamental immaturity, and his tragedy 
 represents the possible misanthropy of many young men in a morally 
 duplicitous society. Clyde’s failure is written as individual yet exemplary. 
 Bigger Thomas’s manhood is denied him completely — is, and yet is not, 
 an individual tragedy. Wright suggests the impossibility of any black man 
 asserting his humanity (for which one can hardly avoid reading “man¬ 
 hood”) without a contradictory act of violence that destroys the newly 
 created self. Of course, it is of critical importance that Bigger’s transcen¬ 
 dent act of violence involves his scramble to “stand tall” as a man on the 
 bodies of the two women he has slain. 
 
 Knock on Any Door represents the bravado and fragility of the Masculine 
 in a duplicitous society. Nick parades his virility and his good looks but, 
 like Clyde, has adopted an essentially hollow quality of masculinity, one 
 that will inevitably implode. Unlike Dreiser’s and Wright’s masculinist 
 sagas of the tragically forestalled quest for manhood, Motley’s novel is 
 complicated by its deployment of the Feminine — not as opposition to the 
 ideal Masculine, but as its vulnerable underbelly. Nick’s body is muscled 
 and lean and tan: archetypically masculine. 17 Yet his face —the window 
 of the soul — has a peculiarly feminine beauty and is topped by a shock 
 of dark, curly, unruly hair. What is more, Nick is always staring into 
 mirrors: 18 
 
 Sometimes now he’d stand in front of the mirror combing his curly brown-black 
 hair and looking deep into his own eyes, admiring them and thinking how inno¬ 
 cent they were. . . . And he knew girls and women on the street glanced at him 
 curious-like. And men too, in a sort of admiration. 19 
 
 Nick is conscious of what his looks mean to other people, and in this sense 
 his vanity is coded as feminine: 
 
 He’d practice his innocent stare on people. On women, men at the poolroom 
 when he was trying to mooch a dime, girls older than he was, Ma when she got 
 after him about something. It always worked like magic. People would just melt in 
 front of him. It became a regular trick. He could always work people by just 
 staring at them kind of sad-like and innocent like. 20 
 
 Nick uses his beauty, is not appreciative of it in itself. His beauty closely 
 corresponds to that of the archetypal figure of the beguiling, cunning, 
 and self-serving woman. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Nick goes on 
 
 Parens Patriae 3 3 
 
to make money from sexual favors to women and men alike. Motley, 
 deferent to the mores of the time, is cautious in his portrayal of Nick’s 
 first homosexual encounter: 
 
 Barney, going across the room with the glasses that gently tinkled together, laid 
 his hand on Nick’s shoulder. And, in his mind, behind his tightly clenched eyelids 
 Nick could see Barney’s arm. The black-haired arm. The heavy, blood-filled 
 veins. A man’s arm. 
 
 “What’s the matter, kid?” Barney asked. 
 
 “Nothing.” 
 
 Nick felt like he was going to cry. To keep from bawling, to stop his bottom lip 
 from trembling, he put his teeth over it and fastened it down. 21 
 
 Barney is a man’s man: hairy-armed, big-veined. Nick’s own body is 
 smooth and hairless. His fear before the threatening masculinity of Bar¬ 
 ney has a particularly virginal, maiden-like, quality about it. Nick begins 
 to regularly w r oo for money those men so attracted to him, then spends 
 his earnings on girls, as if he were trying to “cleanse” the money . 22 
 
 Nick’s homosexual contacts are not all a matter of business, however. 
 He is befriended by one man who makes, initially, no sexual demands. 
 Owen does Nick small acts of kindness, offering him friendship and 
 sanctuary from his family. While their friendship is still new, Nick sus¬ 
 pects that Owen, like all the others, just wants to use him sexually. But 
 when his suspicions are confirmed Nick demurs to Owen’s desire with 
 little complaint and some affection, although consummation can’t occur 
 till they’re both drunk . 23 Thereafter, Nick often stays with Owen, always 
 warning him that he’s “no good” and “money-crazy.” When Nick takes 
 money from Owen it is not as a “scam” but part and parcel of Owen’s 
 accommodation of the terms of their relationship. 
 
 Nick’s “confused” sexuality is ostensibly Modey’s way of describing the 
 systematic destruction of Nick’s humanity, and, of course, his manhood, 
 by a hostile society. Nick is made delinquent, and thus, in essential ways, 
 he is not responsible for his own degeneration. And yet there is some¬ 
 thing contaminating about Nick’s delinquent sexuality, a sexuality ar¬ 
 rested by trauma before its attachment on a settled and appropriate ob¬ 
 ject. The story of Nick’s marriage to Emma makes this clear. Emma 
 adores and is adored by Nick, and her love theoretically offers him escape 
 and redemption. But the offer comes too late. Nick has never learned how 
 
 34 Murder 
 
to do wage work and cannot hold down a job. His return to old haunts 
 comes not just through financial exigency but from the pressure of social 
 and sexual habit. Worse still, Nick is unable to make love to Emma. Their 
 first coupling (so long desired by Emma) is cursory, rough, and aimed 
 only at Nick’s satisfaction. Not long into their marriage Nick loses desire 
 for his wife altogether. His sexuality is structured on the borderline of die 
 child/adult, masculine/feminine: it is liminal, abject, and dangerous. The 
 traumatic arrest of Nick’s sexuality has an exponential power; that is to 
 say, his delinquency, while crippling, is actually fatal to his wife. Emma 
 dies: a slaughtered innocent and quintessential “child.” 
 
 While serving a short prison sentence for theft, Nick has a telling 
 nightmare: 
 
 In his hand he held a huge key. The end was broken off. Lost. He held the butt of 
 the key in his hand. The jagged, broken end was dull metal and blunted. On a 
 higher level of yellow cube was Emma. She stood on a precipitous, smooth-sided 
 vertical with a flat and narrow top. There were no steps up to her. At the foot of 
 the yellow cube, far below her, was a yellow sea of crashing waves.... There was 
 no boat to make the crossing in.... The broken key in his hand. He could feel the 
 coldness of its metal. It crept up into his arm, crept through him, making his arm 
 metal. . . . (H]e couldn’t move. The boyishness was frozen in his eyes, on his 
 cheeks and lips.... Then he was moving ... away from Emma. He was faced into 
 yellow space. At his foot he could see a dismembered arm. Swollen. The tissues 
 ragged at one end. The nerves throbbing in it. An arm with thick, curling black 
 hairs on it. A man’s arm .. , 24 
 
 The broken key signifies Nick’s impotency, yet the castration symbolism 
 is complicated by the image of the severed arm. While that image initially 
 suggests Nick’s first homosexual experience with Barney, it also recalls 
 Fuller, the sadistic reformatory superintendent whose one remaining arm 
 does such brutal works. Strength masks lack. The dream sequence not 
 only points to Nick’s degraded manhood, but creates doubt about the 
 whole category of masculinity itself. 
 
 Nick is feminized, and his experience betrays the fragility of a mas¬ 
 culinity grounded in mere appearance. Interestingly, few characters in the 
 novel do represent a well-balanced and easy sexuality. Rocky is one of 
 those few, and his sexual identity —like that of his “place” (he is a va¬ 
 grant) — remains liminal, untested. The sensuality of Rocky that Nick 
 
 Parens Patriae 35 
 
mimics cannot be maintained. Rocky survives by traveling; his true virtue 
 is his lack of engagement. 
 
 Emma’s initially healthy sexual persona becomes a casualty of the con¬ 
 tagion of self-doubt and loathing carried by Nick. Nick finally tells 
 Emma why he cannot “be a real husband to her”: 
 
 “I was no good from the time I was sixteen. There were men and women. A lot of 
 them.” He could hear his own voice rush on loudly, scaring him. “They gave 
 me money. I always needed money. There was every whore and slut on West 
 Madison.” . . . Inside the room it was so quiet he could hear his conscience 
 condemning him; he could feel the rope his conscience had put about his neck. 25 
 
 A few days after this revelation, Nick returns home to find that Emma has 
 gassed herself. 
 
 Throughout the novel, Nick has as his motto: “[L]ive fast, die young, 
 have a good-looking corpse .” 26 As “Pretty Boy Romano” awaits his ex¬ 
 ecution in the death cell, he searches anxiously for his only remaining 
 possession — his good looks: 
 
 He wanted — awfully — to see himself. Look at himself. He wanted that more than 
 he had ever wanted anything in his life. He sat on the edge of the cot, looking 
 around the dark cell wild-eyed, for something with which to see himself. Some 
 reflecting surface. Numbly he arose and walked around the five-by-eight cell.... 
 He stooped down, looking at the porcelain of the water fountain. Nothing re¬ 
 flected back. He rolled back the mattress and stared at the iron bar of the bunk. 
 No reflection! He looked at the toe of his shoe. No reflection! 27 
 
 This last mirror scene is crucial. The lack of reflection symbolically pre¬ 
 figures Nick’s execution. So long reliant upon image for sustenance, 
 Nick’s imminent real death lacks substance for him until it is translated 
 into how it will look. (“Would it bum? How would he look?”) Even Nick’s 
 body betrays him when he cannot see it. Motley’s materialist theory of 
 degeneration envisions a society 7 that robs Nick of his humanity not just 
 by reducing and imprisoning him in the corporeal realm, but by a further 
 decrement of the body to its mere image. 
 
 Murder is not an incidental event in Knock on Any Doo ?; and it was cer¬ 
 tainly not incidental to the novel’s screen version . 28 Although the central 
 murder narrative — murder as event — involves Nick’s shooting of Riley 
 
 36 Murder 
 
in the alley at the back of the poolroom, murder as event is less important 
 than the way in which murder is deployed as metaphor. Nick’s lawyer’s 
 admonition of society for “murdering” Nick is the most obvious sugges¬ 
 tion of the violence endemic to an unequal American society, and the 
 whole novel resonates with images of symbolic and literal violence. The 
 materialist determinism of Motley’s naturalistic novel suggests that no 
 violence should be naturalized, whether that naturalization occurs in the 
 conceptual framework of society or in “nature .” 29 Motley’s analysis of the 
 social extends beyond the structural and superstructural elements com¬ 
 mon to materialist analysis to include family and the other primary rela¬ 
 tionships which are veiled as private by classical liberal discourse. In such 
 a critique of endemic violence, “murder” becomes an exemplary act of 
 violence, both literal and symbolic. It is an inbuilt effect of the logical 
 structure of violence culturally. Murder for Motley is discrete evidence of 
 greater forces at work impeding both individual and social progress. 
 
 Knock on Any Door is replete with metaphorical incidences of murder. 
 Fuller’s flogging of Tommy, Nick’s friend, can be read as a “little” murder 
 (one that kills not Tommy, but Nick). The misnomer of the reformatory 
 as Boys Home is suggestive. The doctrine of parens patriae is nothing but 
 the false benevolence of a brutally authoritarian paternalism — the disci¬ 
 plinary function of family made overt . 30 The violence of Fuller, the bad 
 father, is unappealable and irrevocable. This linking of Family and In¬ 
 stitution as different agencies of the same disciplinary regime is further 
 suggested by the sullen rage of Nick’s father. Disappointed by his son’s 
 apparent delinquency, Pa Romano drags his seventeen-year-old son from 
 his bed and beats him severely — echoing the earlier scene where Nick is 
 beaten in bed for oversleeping the first morning of his stay at the reforma¬ 
 tory. The sleeper punished for sleeping (a crime the commission of which 
 he cannot be conscious of) is like the child punished for being a child. Pa 
 Romano punishes Nick for not conforming to rules that Nick has never 
 really been made aware of; for not being part of the family the way he 
 should be. 
 
 Arguably, Nick’s killing of Riley could not have occurred without the 
 buildup of violence preceding it; yet that cumulation is essential to the 
 narrative structure of the novel. The punishment dealt out to Nick by 
 society comes home to roost in his murder of the police officer (himself a 
 killer). The story of Nick’s life — predisposing him to murder —is inter- 
 
 Parens Patriae 3 7 
 
preted by his lawyer and advanced as a defense. Morton’s summary of 
 Nick’s life, for all the insight of its polemics, is partial, and in fact com¬ 
 pletely omits the main element of this etiology of crime. Nick confesses 
 to Riley’s murder when he is accused, in an inspired foray of prosecutorial 
 rhetoric, of the moral murder of his own wife. Clearly, Emma’s death has 
 greater moral weight than Riley’s, and Nick chooses to hold himself to 
 account for it. Later, when he is awaiting execution, it is the emotional 
 “death” of his mother that ratifies his conviction for murder. Nick’s ac¬ 
 ceptance of his failure as son and husband, and his construction of that 
 failure as murder, indicates the central place of gender in Modey’s degen¬ 
 eration theory. Of all the things that have gone wrong in his life, it is 
 Nick’s ambiguous masculinity that marks the site of the irreparable harm, 
 of murder. Clearly, for Motley, none of this uncertainty is Nick’s fault, but 
 Nick’s guilt indicates his embodiment of the blame, regardless. And I do 
 not use the word “embodiment” idly: it is Nick’s body (his impotence) 
 that announces the train of circumstance that will end in Riley’s death . 31 
 Of course, the irony is that Nick’s failed masculinity is not a physical but a 
 psychological phenomenon. Nick reads that failure as immanent because 
 he mistakes his body for his self, and image for reality. It is that uninten¬ 
 tional irony which signals the real strength of the novel. Knock on Any 
 Door .; by virtue of its deployment of shifting masculine and feminine 
 values, adds new depth to an already rich literature of realism. The mate¬ 
 rialist premise is enriched by the sensuality of Motley’s narcissistic bodies. 
 And given the problematic relationship of the body to identity formation 
 demonstrated in the character of Nick Romano, murder becomes more 
 than a moral problem or event. Murder as metaphor — in the context of 
 the beautiful, deluded bodies that people the novel —is one’s own death 
 witnessed in a mirror. 
 
 Strange Fruit 
 
 When William March was twenty-four he enlisted in the U.S. Marines 
 and caught the tail end of the war in France, where he was gassed, 
 wounded, and decorated. The croix de guerre was not his sole memento 
 of the Great War, for he remained burdened by the cross of war long after 
 
 38 Murder 
 
he’d divested himself of the bauble on his dress jacket. His early novel, 
 Company K, grappled with his experience of World War I, attempting to 
 test that experience “empirically” through a microcosmic focus on the 
 individuals caught up in it. War was a marshaling ground for a mass of 
 complex human feelings and actions; not evil in and of itself, but a stage 
 for individual acts of cruelty and heroism. 
 
 Somewhere between the bounds of free choice (how one acts in war) 
 and the blind, unreasoning hand of fate (the peculiar contingencies of 
 war) might lie the etiology of human evil. Arguably, the lesson of war for 
 March was that free will came out a poor second, if at all. Humankind 
 seemed an excellent vessel for all manner of evil, albeit a vessel shaped by 
 circumstance. 
 
 One critic wrote of William March that “he tends to see all people as 
 either mentally or psychologically deformed, and all relationships be¬ 
 tween them, particularly close family relationships, as endless variants of 
 sadism and masochism, hatred and answering love, murder and expia¬ 
 tion.” 32 Writing just as America was in the thick of a second world war, 
 Stanley Hyman reads March with a jaundiced eye. How could the rela¬ 
 tionships binding the human family not be pictured as an “endless” acting 
 out of the fearful mutuality of sadomasochistic connection? 
 
 The Bad Seed was March’s last novel, published just a couple of months 
 before his death in May 1954. Within the space of a few years, the novel 
 had been converted into a stage play by Maxwell Anderson and a film 
 based upon Anderson’s adaption. March did not live to appreciate the 
 impact of his final work. 
 
 For March, the novel represented the refinement of a lifetime’s strug¬ 
 gle with the problem of human evil. His ideas had not become more 
 generous. The Bad Seed clearly shows his belief (confided to a friend) that 
 some people — without any cause at all —“are truly evil.” 33 March’s prin¬ 
 cipal source for his imaging of the “true evil” of Rhoda Penmark (the 
 precocious multiple killer of the novel) was his substantial collection of 
 true crime stories that dealt with “seemingly ‘no cause’ types of mur¬ 
 der.” 34 The empirical foundations of the novel then become clear but, 
 unlike Motley’s critical attention to the social laboratory that constructed 
 Nick Romano, the data on “criminality” informing The Bad Seed are of an 
 entirely different order. 35 March’s collection of evil precedents for Rhoda 
 
 Parens Patriae 39 
 
Penmark turn up, either explicitly or in composite form, throughout the 
 novel. March’s inclusion of these notorious murderers indicates his own 
 trust in the true crime tale as an explanatory tool. 
 
 The Bad Seed is a novel dominated by its women characters, but it is a 
 world created by absent fathers. 36 Kenneth Penmark, Rhoda’s father, is 
 present only at the novel’s conclusion and in snatches of remembered 
 conversation. Richard Bravo, Christine’s father, is long dead. Her biolog¬ 
 ical father, August Denker, was an ephemeral figure in her early life, 
 conjured by the adult Christine from faded photographs or the memory 
 of his comet-playing. All the men of the novel, particularly these three, 
 are sheltered by a naivete that is astonishing. They are oblivious to the 
 evil they have married, fostered, or begat, and their innocence sustains 
 that evil. Reginald Tasker, the true crime writer who is a friend of Chris¬ 
 tine’s describes for her the man who is her real father: “[He] was the 
 preordained one who turns up over and over in the career of the mass 
 murderer —the one who, through his natural trust, and the innocence of 
 his outlook, makes possible the murderer’s triumphs.... [H]e was blond, 
 with delicate, almost feminine, features; and his eyes had looked out at 
 the world with innocence and candour.” 37 Similarly, Kenneth Penmark 
 and Richard Bravo are to be held to account for their naivete. 38 Rhoda’s 
 father returns too late to the home and therefore remains ignorant of his 
 daughter’s true nature. Kenneth is also to blame for generously discount¬ 
 ing the early evidence of his daughter’s monstrosity. 39 
 
 Kenneth’s absence is useful to Christine. She is able to position him as a 
 standard of rationality and faith against which to measure her own irra¬ 
 tionality and doubt. She must protect his innocence but also utilize it, and 
 does so in the unsent letters to him in which she wishes that he would 
 “mb [his] cheek against [hers] and tell [her] not to worry so.” Christine’s 
 determination to keep Kenneth out of the brewing trouble with Rhoda 
 shows her concern for his career, but it is also aimed at keeping unsullied 
 the figure of husband (and father). She reasons that “Kenneth must go on 
 with his work untroubled and unhindered, and she must go on with hers 
 as best she could. The problem of Rhoda was basically her problem, and 
 she must solve it.” 40 While later in the novel Christine momentarily 
 considers Rhoda a “joint problem” to be solved upon Kenneth’s return, 
 the revelation of the genetic “taint” forces her once again to take full 
 responsibility for Rhoda. 41 Then, rather than use the figure of her hus- 
 
 40 Murder 
 
band as the measure of normality and rationality that signals redemption 
 and security, Christine warns him that he must “abandon” his wife and 
 daughter on his return lest the “hateful taint” afflict him further. Both 
 strategies attempt to protect her husband’s innocence and to maintain 
 him as a standard. This technique for the displacement of her own ra¬ 
 tionality, faith, and goodness describes one of the central discursive ma¬ 
 neuvers of the novel. The private realm of the Family and Woman has 
 innocendy propagated an evil that the public realm of the Father is 
 powerless, in its ignorance, to correct. But it is the very dichotomization 
 of the two realms that makes for their vulnerability: why should the 
 “problem of Rhoda” be Christine’s alone? 
 
 The lesson of Richard Bravo, Christine’s biological father, demon¬ 
 strates the problematic nature of dualistic constructions: public/private, 
 culture/nature, and environment/genetics. Bravo is an exemplary Lock¬ 
 ean rationalist vainly trying to shape the Hobbesian world. His belief in 
 the social and environmental origin of crime spurs him on to conduct his 
 empirical research in the laboratory of his own family. But Christine is 
 not saved by environment, as the unpredictable but inevitable genetic 
 “taint” reemerges in her daughter, signaling the true inheritance not of 
 rationality but brute evil: 
 
 They shared a bond of horror that bound them together, that tied them to a 
 common past: a community of guilt that could never be changed through thought 
 or word: they were fixed together by the life of Bessie Denker. There was no going 
 behind that fact. There was no escape for either of them. 42 
 
 Bravo, as an apostle of the social, has been a false prophet. Ironically, his 
 commitment to culture has provided nature with the conditions neces¬ 
 sary for the propagation of the “bad seed.” Bravo’s cheerful belief in the 
 malleability of the individual is passed on to his daughter, not to be 
 shifted until the revelation of her own “biological destiny.” Thus, even at 
 the first signs of Rhoda’s atavism (the suspicious circumstances surround¬ 
 ing Mrs. Post’s death in Baltimore and Rhoda’s dismissal from school 
 there for “thieving”), her parent’s naive solution is to opt for a change of 
 environment. Rhoda is placed in the traditionalist and conservative Fern 
 School in the hope that its emphasis on “discipline and the old-fashioned 
 virtues . . . would eliminate, or at least modify, some of the upsetting 
 factors of her temperament.” 43 The residue of this optimism is Christine’s 
 
 Parens Patriae 41 
 
protectiveness toward the child, even after the truth of Rhoda’s mur¬ 
 derousness has fully dawned upon her. Her determination to own the 
 “problem of Rhoda” and keep the truth even from her husband results in 
 the eventual liberation of Rhoda to her criminal future. Thus the sanctity 
 of the private realm — the kernel of familial sentiment represented by the 
 maternal bond — is as dangerous a construct as the optimistic rationality 
 of Bravo’s social realm. 
 
 Alarch’s novel maintains a kind of cynical ambiguity in its figuring of the 
 relationship between nature and culture. While it seeks to naturalize evil 
 as the constant and ineradicable companion of progress, it criticizes the 
 distinction between natural and social realms. Undeniably, March adopts 
 an essentialist position of human evil as the Monstrous becomes merely 
 the extreme end of a continuum of natural human brutishness. 44 The 
 Monstrous is humankind’s nightmare in the sleep of reason. And yet, the 
 novel is not entirely biologically deterministic. The “bad seed” is quite 
 able to skip whole generations, and may come out in one child and not 
 another: it is a blind force and curiously random. Thus Leroy Jessup, the 
 handyman, who is undeniably bad (though not so bad as Rhoda), is point¬ 
 edly described as coming from a good family, with no suggestion of either 
 bad blood or poor environment. 45 Although March uses Leroy’s bad char¬ 
 acter to take a swipe at environmental liberalism, the origin of that charac¬ 
 ter remains unknown. Society may be responsible for its inability to rec¬ 
 ognize and take seriously men like Leroy, 46 but it is undecided whether 
 society is in fact responsible for his creation. 47 Despite the random and 
 unknowable nature of human evil, it is its ever-present threat that typifies 
 modem society. Thus, early in the novel, well before Christine begins to 
 suspect her child’s monstrosity and her own “taint,” she gets an intimation 
 of the blight soon to be cast on their lives. She overhears twn men discuss¬ 
 ing the “age of anxiety and violence” they live in: 
 
 It seemed to her suddenly that violence was an inescapable factor of the heart, 
 perhaps the most important factor of all; an ineradicable thing that lay, like a 
 bad seed, behind kindness, behind compassion, behind the embrace of love it¬ 
 self. Sometimes it lay deeply hidden, sometimes it lay close to the surface; but 
 always it was there, ready to appear, under the right conditions, in all its irrational 
 dreadfulness. 48 
 
 42 Murder 
 
This crucial passage demonstrates the ambiguity of an evil that is a “natu¬ 
 ral” human quality, but one that is propagated and acted out in the social 
 realm. Although evil shelters in the “heart,” it may manifest itself only 
 “under the right conditions” — conditions which are ineluctably social. 
 Humankinds perpetual vanity is the drive to obliterate “nature” with 
 history, and its attempts are ill-fated. That vanity is perhaps signaled most 
 eloquently by Christine’s revelatory research into her mother’s life. She 
 does most of her work in the Trellis Library, which is a noble structure 
 built upon the site of an old graveyard. Knowledge and history vie with 
 death, but cannot banish it. 49 Death also has its history. 
 
 Murder Memorialized 
 
 March’s novel evinces a peculiar relationship to the genre of true crime, 
 assuming an ironic distance from it while utilizing not just its descriptive 
 but its supposedly explanatory force. True crime is the passion of at least 
 three characters in the novel: Monica; her brother, Emory; and Reginald 
 Tasker. Crime writing also represents Richard Bravo’s most famous work. 
 True crime in March’s text is an important facet of both popular culture 
 and sociological theory, and its devotees describe a whole spectrum of 
 talent and scholarly rigor. 50 Monica Breedlove domesticates murder in 
 her description of her brother’s interests, reducing the murder narrative 
 to just another form of recreation: 
 
 What are Emory’s deepest interests in life; what are the things that occupy his 
 psyche? . .. They are fishing, murder mysteries that involve the dismemberment 
 of faithful housewives, canasta, baseball games, and singing in male quartettes. 51 
 
 Although Monica is here indicating that her brother enjoys detective 
 fiction, rather than the true crime tale, crime fiction gets considerably less 
 of a look in throughout the novel than does crime “fact.” Detective fic¬ 
 tion appears throughout the novel as a means to cover or code the tale of 
 true crime. Christine masks her research into murder and her own fam¬ 
 ily’s murderous history by telling Reginald Tasker that she needs help 
 with the plot of the mystery story she intends to write. Tasker responds 
 not with advice on techniques of writing detective fiction or opinions on 
 
 Parens Patriae 43 
 
the genre repertoire, but with case histories of actual murderers. Tasker 
 outlines for Christine the “type” that is his “specialty”: 
 
 They never killed for those reasons that so often sway warm but foolish humans: 
 they never killed for passion, since they seemed incapable of feeling it, or jealousy, 
 or thwarted love, or even revenge. There seemed to be no element of sexual 
 cruelty in them. They killed for two reasons only: for profit, since they all had an 
 unconquerable desire for possessions, and for the elimination of danger when 
 their safety was threatened. 52 
 
 Tasker tells Christine that he has been “clipping and saving reports of 
 such cases” for years. Thus March’s own file of “no cause” murders finds 
 its way into the novel. The Bad Seed makes clear that this is just the 
 criminal “type” March himself is interested in. All of the many murderers 
 mentioned in the novel killed for insurance, property, or possessions. 53 A 
 “no cause” murder, then, is one committed in cold blood for gain. 54 
 
 At this stage in the novel, Tasker has already shown his predilection for 
 a good murder. At a social gathering, he tells the guests about a murder he 
 is covering “for one of his murder magazines.” Tasker’s tale, told with 
 great gusto, entertains all present but Christine, who confesses to an 
 aversion to “anything concerning crime.” Such stories “depressed her 
 and made her anxious.” 55 It should therefore be quite surprising to her 
 friends when Christine later announces her decision to write her own 
 murder tale. That lack of surprise attests to the degree to which Tasker 
 and the Breedlove siblings are beguiled by the tale of murder. Effectively, 
 whether the tale is fiction or fact makes little difference. To the true crime 
 devotee the integrity of the story is all-important. Monica confides to 
 Christine her assessment of Tasker as a crime writer, comparing his con¬ 
 siderable but lesser talents to those of Frederic Wertham, William Bo- 
 litho, and William Roughead. 56 Tasker’s gift, in Monica’s assessment, is a 
 “compassionate irony.” 57 While irony is much in evidence, “compassion” 
 is not; and it could be argued that the ironic mode is antagonistic to 
 critical reflection and, therefore, to compassion. 58 
 
 Tasker is but one indicator in March’s novel of the tendency of true 
 crime to aestheticize its subject. Monica Breedlove adopts exacdy the 
 same amused and ironic tone in her synopsis of the life of a neighborhood 
 man recently indicted for murder. Not long after she has embarked on 
 
 44 Murder 
 
the research “for her novel,” Christine imagines the kind of notoriety 
 lying in wait for her daughter should her story get picked up by the 
 media: “Tot Kills Two." In the writings of “Madison Cravatte” on Bessie 
 Denker, Christine first encounters the banality of sensationalism and the 
 delight that murder seems to engender. Cravatte, with “the tittering wit 
 so typical of his speciality” (more kindly termed “irony” by Tasker), pro¬ 
 claims: “I make no secret of my admiration for this endearing lady. Bessie 
 Denker was tops in my book. We’re going steady now. Bessie Denker is 
 my sweetheart, and I don’t care who knows it.” 59 
 
 Tasker has himself labeled the file in which Cravatte’s biography, The 
 Unparalleled Bessie Denker .; is found — demonstrating that he too has made 
 a murderous icon of Christine’s mother. 60 Sentiments such as these from 
 Cravatte and Tasker describe the extent to which true crime can be de¬ 
 scribed as a generic form, intertextually dependent upon both the fic¬ 
 tional crime genre and upon other forms not recognized as fiction. The 
 supposedly critical facility of true crime (played out in the debate on 
 heredity versus environment in the etiology of crime) is overshadowed by 
 its generic function as entertainment. Reginald Tasker, an apostle of 
 degeneration theory, 61 ignores the implicit threat of his own philosophy 
 in favor of the joys of plotting the outcome in the cases he collects. 
 Ironically, therefore, his whole classificatory enterprise — to document 
 the “natural” origin of crime — is diverted into the creation of a literature 
 and ailture of crime. 
 
 The discourse of true crime becomes, in effect, indistinguishable from 
 the fictional genres of crime in the detective and mystery story. This 
 elision of the “fiction” and “fact” of murder is eloquendy illustrated by 
 the scene toward the novel’s conclusion wherein Christine is advised by a 
 crime fiction buff on a fitting end to her “novel.” Of course the plot of 
 Christine’s “novel” is in fact the unfolding progress of her own cursed 
 life. Miss Glass, to whom Christine had formerly confided the problem of 
 what the mother should do about her child, tells Christine that she took 
 the “problem” to a group that “pondered trends in writing.” In the ensu¬ 
 ing hour the group had “discussed every possible solution”: 
 
 It had been like a jury discussing an actual case, really. They’d debated the possi¬ 
 bilities of psychiatric treatment, reform school, or blind faith in the future; and in 
 
 Parens Patriae 45 
 
the end they’d taken a vote: it had been unanimously decided that the only 
 possible way to end the book was for the mother to keep her secret, kill the child, 
 and then commit suicide. 62 
 
 Christine concurs, opining that that ending “is the one” she’ll “have to 
 use.” There is a curious form of doubling here. The fictional fate of the 
 mother and her murderous daughter is determined by Miss Glass and her 
 friends, constituting themselves as a “jury” —an assembly that, in the 
 realm of actual justice, determines fate. And yet the novel is a ploy, a ruse 
 to cover the facts of Christine’s life. In accepting the determination of the 
 “jury,” Christine accepts an actual judgment which condemns both her 
 and her daughter to death. The actual becomes fictional, then returns to 
 the actual again. 
 
 Although true crime provides the means by which Christine discovers 
 the truth about herself, and the solution to the situation presented by that 
 revelation, she manages to prevent her case (or, more properly, Rhoda’s) 
 from coming under its lights. Her determination to save Rhoda comes 
 from her abhorrence for the devotion accorded the infamous. Not for 
 Rhoda that “specialized literature of legend” that made one “better 
 known for the ... evil they’d created” than were “the most compassionate 
 people” known for doing good. Nor did Christine want her daughter to 
 “end up in a blare of publicity and sentiment: in the gas chamber, at the 
 end of a rope, or lunging forward as the current struck her, and hurtled 
 through her blood.” 63 Christine covertly makes her own life and Rhoda’s 
 into a story to stop them from overdy becoming one. 
 
 The previous discussion oudines the case for the novel being, in part at 
 least, a critique of the true crime genre. March’s reiteration of a catalogue 
 of murderers, however, and his acceptance of a classification of “no cause” 
 crimes, is evidence of his own belief in the explanatory power of “true 
 crime.” His parodic criticism of the sensationalizing and aestheticizing 
 excesses of true crime cannot disguise the fact that he too is the product of 
 a culture of mediated violence (though not as yet a “hyperaestheticized” 
 culture, as Joel Black would term it). This is demonstrated by his figuring 
 of Bessie Denker as a composite of two actual murderers, Belle Gunness 
 and Ruth Brown Snyder. As a “type,” Bessie Denker might just as well 
 have been a complete fictional creation: representative instead of “real.” 
 March just cannot resist Belle Gunness — considered an exemplary' villain 
 
 46 Murder 
 
in the history of American crime. 64 Snyder, executed in 1928 with her 
 lover and accomplice, Judd Gray, contributes only one element to the life 
 of Bessie Denker, but it is a crucial one — her execution: 
 
 Her mother’s death in the chair had been a sensation that had been featured 
 everywhere. There was a photograph of her mother at the time of her death. A 
 reporter had smuggled in a camera . . . and at the instant the current hit Bessie 
 Denker ... the picture was snapped. 
 
 . . . Everything was there for the eye to see: the black mask that covered her 
 mother s face; the bound hands raised from the wrist, trembling, and out of focus 
 from movement; the fingers spread apart like the talons of a predatory bird; the 
 thick, dead white, hairless legs, strapped down and bulging outward under the 
 power of the current. 65 
 
 Only the detail of the raised fingers is an addition to the photograph of 
 Ruth Snyder that appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News 
 beneath the banner headline “dead !” Like Ethel Rosenberg (in the year 
 of the novel’s writing), Ruth Snyder became the “natural prey of por- 
 nographers,” yet she did not rate an explicit mention by March. 66 Only 
 her death is useful: she was executed for murdering for “love,” rather than 
 for gain. 67 Just as Christine Penmark justified to Tasker her enquiries into 
 murder for a “book to be reinforced and supported by the details of actual 
 cases,” March claims authority for his fiction through the use of true 
 crime. 68 Given his intention that the novel should be more than mere 
 entertainment, that authority was essential — representing, in fact, his last 
 word on the problem of human evil. 69 On the face of it, March’s use of the 
 true crime genre marks his resistance to the use of murder as metaphor. 
 Yet this instrumentalism veils with cynicism his investment of the mur¬ 
 derous impulses of humankind with a distincdy mysterious nature. 
 
 Although the contest of heredity and environment is immediately ap¬ 
 parent, the philosophical core of the novel is not so much expressed by 
 the theme of degeneration as by its brand of crisis theology. This is 
 revealed through a number of references to eschatology and also by the 
 ironic position the novel assumes vis-a-vis psychoanalysis. Fundamen¬ 
 tally, the mind of God is unknowable, and the mind of mankind — that 
 creature created in his image — is equally opaque. This philosophy finds 
 its voice in Octavia Fern, the headmistress at Rhoda’s school. When 
 Christine Penmark visits the school, Miss Fern — shocked by the inexpli- 
 
 Parens Patriae 47 
 
cable death of the Daigle boy —waxes philosophical. Christine, appearing 
 to listen, is actually in one of her peculiar reveries, and it is therefore the 
 reader who is Miss Fern’s sole audience. Having just dismissed the idea 
 that Rhoda could have had anything at all to do with the boy’s death, Miss 
 Fern falls to musing about the ubiquity of guilt in humanity, an irrational 
 guilt that attaches itself to any and all acts and ideas: 
 
 [I]t was only natural to expect that we all have our particular guilts, since our 
 development, our very place in the world we live in, is based on that premise. We 
 are taught from the beginning that. . . man himself is entirely vile: that his very 
 birth is the end result of a furtive sin to be wailed over and atoned somehow. 70 
 
 This passage introduces a critical position on doctrinal Christianity, 
 while also suggesting that the relation of conscience to act is inscrutable 
 and possibly arbitrary. Musing upon the relativity of morality, Miss Fern 
 asks: 
 
 How can we know that our own concepts of good and evil concern God in the 
 slightest? How can we be so sure He even understands our tests and definitions? 
 Certainly, there’s nothing in nature, in the cruel habits of animals, that should lead 
 us to think He does. 71 
 
 God, it seems, is as ignorant of his creation as we are of him — although 
 we retain the conceit of knowledge. Miss Fern’s final comment, as she 
 wryly dismisses Monica Breedlove’s characterization of her as “that ro¬ 
 mantic Whistler’s mother amongst school ma’ams,” completes the exis¬ 
 tentialist direction of this monologue. Monica Breedlove, it should be 
 recalled, is a noisy advocate for the critical and therapeutic force of psy¬ 
 choanalysis: “Actually, it’s the other way around. Monica thinks man’s 
 mind can be changed through lying on a couch and talking endlessly to 
 another man who is often as lost as the patient. Really, Monica is far more 
 trusting and romantic than I.” 72 Although Miss Fern suggests that man’s 
 mind cannot be “changed” by psychoanalysis, the implication is that 
 neither can it be known. 
 
 Understanding March’s crisis theology is necessary to unpack the con¬ 
 ception of evil in the novel. God’s and man’s moral languages do not 
 coincide: even the doctrine of the received word of God represented by 
 the Old Testament cannot be taken as evidence of the dialectic between 
 God and man, let alone as moral direction. It is pointedly observed that 
 
 48 Murder 
 
Rhoda herself shows a great affinity for, and understanding of, Old Testa¬ 
 ment chapter and verse: “there is something as terrible and primitive 
 about her, as there is about them.” 73 The Bad Seed portrays a world in 
 which neither humanist rationalism nor religious devotion can guard 
 against, or trace, evil. Evil is an “inescapable factor of the heart” — that 
 which “lies behind” all the veneers of human affection and civilization 
 itself. 74 It is both essential and worldly. As God is unknowable, the prob¬ 
 lem of evil — presumably part of a divine plan and therefore natural — 
 must be insoluble. Humankind, severed from God, must own an evil that 
 it can never rationalize away. Yet to own that evil, ironically, means to 
 make it of the social. March’s existentialism serves ultimately to mitigate 
 the biological determinism that is the supposed rationale of the novel. 
 
 The film version of the novel came out hard on the heels of the stage 
 play, still running while the novel was in its first imprint. The film 
 brought the play to the screen, retaining many of the mainstays of theme 
 and plot from the novel. But, for all that, somewhere in this process of 
 adaption the complexity of the novel was lost. The director, Mervyn Le 
 Roy, had had a checkered career but could be credited with one of the 
 early masterworks of the crime genre: Little Caesar. Potentially, The Bad 
 Seed could have figured as an interesting twist in the development of the 
 crime film; but, still bound by the standards of the Breen Committee, Le 
 Roy was committed to showing that crime doesn’t pay. Rhoda does not 
 survive to carry on her criminal career in the film — but neither could the 
 screenwriters (following Anderson’s lead) have any truck with suicide and 
 the murder of children. Rhoda and Christine survive Christine’s radical 
 plan to “protect” her daughter, and Rhoda is dispatched by the handy but 
 highly unlikely intervention of a bolt of lightning. 
 
 The film proclaims a confidence in both God and man that the novel 
 pointedly lacks. God must “understand our tests and definitions” of good 
 and evil if he sees fit to intercede to avert the death of the innocent 
 (Christine) and to annihilate the guilty (Rhoda). Equally, faith in man is 
 evinced by the film’s gesture toward the remedial influence of environ¬ 
 ment (even after the lengths to which it has gone to prove the theory of 
 genetic taint). After the final credits have rolled, Rhoda comes onstage 
 and is given a sound spanking by her grandfather, Richard Bravo, who 
 tells the screaming child that this is just what she’s always needed. 
 
 One of the major weaknesses of the film is its reinsertion of the “absent 
 
 Parens Patriae 49 
 
fathers.” Kenneth is present at the beginning of the film and we cut to 
 him occasionally in his Pentagon office. Richard Bravo also appears, and 
 he confirms the identity of Christine’s true parents when she asks him, 
 “Daddy . . . father . . . who’s child am I?” The return of “daddy” and 
 “father” (in the guise of both Kenneth and Richard Bravo) removes the 
 central tension from the plot: Christine’s virtual isolation with the “prob¬ 
 lem of Rhoda.” The dilution of this isolation — signaled in the book by 
 Christine’s solitary and covert pursuit of the truth about her past —is at 
 least partly the result of the exigencies of the medium. The scene of 
 action was necessarily contracted for the theatre, meaning that the solu¬ 
 tion to Christine’s questions comes to her, rather than she going to it . 15 
 Accordingly, though Christine remains the central figure, the drama no 
 longer issues from her. She is its object, not its subject. 76 
 
 The film lacks March’s commitment to describing what he considered 
 “true evil”; the characters of Leroy and Rhoda are softened. Leroy is 
 cleansed of his lascivious obsession with the child (and, importantly, 
 Rhoda’s character is aged to keep at bay the troublesome border of child¬ 
 hood and all the suggestions of precocity, sexual and otherwise, that it 
 implies). Rhoda is even made to express a kind of mawkish love for her 
 mother toward the end of the film. March’s Rhoda, on the other hand, 
 enjoys her mother’s increasing remoteness. At no time does she express 
 any genuine desire for her mother’s company. The trend shown by these 
 changes to the lead characters — the creation of composites, the reinser¬ 
 tion of Christine’s husband and father into the plot —brings the ambig¬ 
 uous gender order of the book into line with a more homogenized, palat¬ 
 able, and unifying ideology of the family. 77 The result of that redrawing 
 of the formerly 7 shaky line between gendered spheres was an increasing 
 tendency to locate murderous evil (as well as other manifestations of 
 deviance) outside the norm. That commitment to a qualitative differen¬ 
 tiation of the pathological from the normal was instrumental in the dis¬ 
 cursive shift in forensic psychiatry toward the identification of the rela¬ 
 tively new 7 categories of “delinquent” and “psychopath” (among other 
 inventions). 78 Given this tendency in positivistic criminology 7 and psychi¬ 
 atry 7 (and a true crime genre that had always favored the monstrous), the 
 intellectual cowardice of the film versions of Knock on Any Door and The 
 Bad Seed is singularly unsurprising. 79 
 
 50 Murder 
 
Moral Murders 
 
 Here I have described two different responses to the problem of violence 
 in contemporary American life. While Willard Motley deploys the meta¬ 
 phor of murder to describe the degenerative effect of an unequal society, 
 William March uses murder as the extreme edge of a continuum of human 
 evil not recognized by liberal society. Both novels are deterministic in 
 their conception of evil —Motley describing the structural and material 
 determinants of crime and March bidding, at least nominally, for a biolog¬ 
 ically essentialist causation. Motley’s structural interpretation compels 
 him toward the utilization of murder as metaphor, figuring the life story of 
 Nick Romano as a series of “little” murders that culminate in the actual 
 killing of Officer Riley. March, on the other hand, tends to use murder as 
 an empirically given category, as the seed (pun intended) of “fact” about 
 which the remainder of his tale shapes itself. Thus, although The Bad, Seed 
 is explicitly concerned with the problem of human evil evidenced by 
 murder, the meanings of murder advanced by the novel are strictly lim¬ 
 ited. March even restricts his empirical category to what he erroneously 
 terms “no cause” murders — those committed for gain. March’s delight in 
 the genre of true crime (tempered by his criticism of its tendency to 
 aestheticize murder and to heroize the murderer) undermines his ability 
 to examine critically its meaning-laden category. Knock on Any Door iron¬ 
 ically advances a much more complex set of meanings for murder: scru¬ 
 tinizing the act of murder and employing murder as metaphor to describe 
 the actual and symbolic violence done to the individual by society. Mur¬ 
 der—as cultural artifact and as individual act —is wrapped in meaning. 
 Murder, as a central part of the action and the metaphorical structure of 
 both novels, cannot fail to partake of the wider developmental (or degen¬ 
 erative) themes. William March is concerned with Rhoda’s precocity as 
 well as with the process of her mother’s policing of those already breached 
 moral borders. The threats and taints of genetics must also become a 
 discussion about generations, about adult responsibility, abuse, and the 
 “premoral” precocities of childhood (and adolescence). The following 
 chapters will go on to unpack some of those meanings with a critical 
 analysis of the discourse of true crime, both in its scholarly guise as 
 forensic psychology and as popular literature. 
 
 Parens Patriae 51 
 
3. Min(d)ing the Murderer 
 
 Nothing beyond the speech of common mortals can be 
 spoken save by the agitated soul. 
 
 Aristotle 
 
 Mythology and classical literature have furnished many murderous ar¬ 
 chetypes, from Thyestes, Agamemnon, Orestes, and Oedipus to Clytem- 
 nestra and Medea. Tragedies of revenge and ritual sacrifice unpurified are 
 still used to rechart narratives of murder. These mythical archetypes and 
 their metaphorical foundations can clearly be seen in two explicit re¬ 
 authorings of the tale of murder. 1 The process of navigation by such stars 
 has significant implications for the construction of murder narratives; 
 although of course neither transhistorically nor transculturally constant, 
 these archetypes or metaphors indicate the structural effect of both gen¬ 
 der and genre within such mythic master narratives. 2 
 
 In 546 b.c. Herostratus set ablaze the temple of Diana at Ephesus, 
 knowing that even though the heat of the flames would abate, the heat of 
 the controversy would not, and in that longevity would lie his fame. Like 
 later generations in that long pedigree of murder in the West, he sought 
 to die by killing, and to gain glory by that sacrifice. The term “Hero- 
 stratus complex” is still sometimes applied to those who kill for glory. Dr. 
 Fredric Wertham’s reading of this and other mythological archetypes is a 
 significant part of his analytic project. Both he and Judge Curtis Bok 
 wrote as experts, aposdes of increased psychiatric intervention and the 
 reform of existing judicial and corrective procedures. Their expertise was 
 founded upon the subdety of their understandings of the “deviant” mind, 
 an interpretive power that owed much to their work with literary modes 
 of analysis. 
 
 The Show of Violence and Star Wormwood, Bok’s philosophical-juridical 
 
treatise, construct “reasonable” stories out of the apparent madness of the 
 murderous acts they treat. Their projects locate the meaning and signifi¬ 
 cance of murder in particular ways, in that the object of wonder they 
 construct (from their own desire) is neither crime nor victim, but mur¬ 
 derer. Their narratives are critical and culturally located, both in their 
 investigation of the role of arbiter, expert, and author (Wertham the 
 psychiatrist, Bok the judge) and in their emphasis on the life story and 
 psychic history of their subjects. 
 
 Both writers untangle anecdote and symbol through psychoanalysis of 
 their subjects to create these “reasonable” stories. This desire to create 
 order is partly a narrative or topological impulse, but it is also the logical 
 outcome of the humanistic assumptions of the authors. The search for 
 the possibilities of existence for a rational society can be achieved only 
 through a systematic assault upon the silence and open-endedness of the 
 psychoanalytic project, until the doctor and the judge are able to fix both 
 psychoanalysis as a therapeutic science and the particular pathology of 
 their subject. The interpretive process of classification makes the analyst, 
 not the analysand, the apparent master of signification in the analytic 
 discourse. For both authors, murder/murderer —properly decoded — 
 furnishes a single, stable meaning, psychically and socially. 
 
 Wertham, a German-born, Edinburgh-educated disciple of Freud, was 
 one of America’s leading forensic psychiatrists for three decades at mid¬ 
 century. Like most of Freud’s followers in America, Wertham had gone 
 the way of an emphasis on object relations, rather than in the direction of 
 a more purely Freudian (or Lacanian) analysis of the vicissitudes of sub¬ 
 ject formation. Such an ego-centered philosophy of mind had radical 
 results for Wertham’s preoccupation with diagnostic classification. His 
 emphasis on object relations lent itself explicitly to the interpretation of 
 murderous “psychoses” in the context of social control theory. Wertham’s 
 liberalism overlays a confident belief in the ability of sympathetic experts 
 to tinker with the interface of individual and society in order to make 
 entity and collective progress equally. 
 
 Wertham was not just one more of the many experts then engaged in 
 the struggle for hegemony in the new science of therapeutic psychiatry. 
 He had effectively gained the ear of the public and was to become an 
 important interpreter and champion of the intervention of medical ex¬ 
 pertise in judicial process. Along the way, he would also become an influ- 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 5 3 
 
ential mediator on the meaning of murder in American society as it 
 entered the boom age of the 1950s. 
 
 For Wertham the urge to classify was paramount. His main interest in 
 analyzing murder was to perfect psychiatry’s supposed ability to predict 
 and prevent acts of violence by the insane. 3 Classification, and the princi¬ 
 ple of ordering, are logical (i.e., integral) instruments in an interpretive 
 system of knowledge that aspires to the status of a science. 4 Wertham 
 described the positivist core of psychiatry: “Psychiatry is not a young 
 science, but it is still in a stage of development where description is on a 
 firmer scientific ground than interpretation, where experienced clinical 
 judgment still has to count more than objective laws about dynamic pro¬ 
 cesses. In all the sciences in that stage, classification remains a big issue.” 5 
 The emphasis here on classification is best read in the context of his 
 primary distinction between “description” and “interpretation.” That 
 distinction is a symbolically violent one that obscures the dependence of 
 description upon an interpretive, or tropological, act. Classification — the 
 listing and ordering of data to fix the various “real” objects of scrutiny in 
 either hierarchical or apposite relation — is a narrative act. 6 It is an inter¬ 
 pretive process aimed at creating a history: whether of the evolution of a 
 genus, the demise of a city-state, or the life span of a virus. Such an under¬ 
 standing of the classificatory impulse has interesting ramifications for a 
 study of the analytic or “high” literature of true crime dealt with here. 
 
 The making of meaning, both in the talking cure of the ego-dominated 
 psychoanalytic process and in the interpretation and construction of a 
 murder narrative for which the murderer is the focal subject, is essentially 
 a bid for the creation of a “reasonable” story. Poised at the brink of 
 unraveling the troubled psyche of Robert Irwin, Dr. Wertham describes 
 that moment as a transition from inarticulacy (chaos) to meaning (rea¬ 
 son). 7 Through a process of “trust, if not reason” the doctor eventually 
 passed through the barrier of Irwin’s disorganized communication, his 
 “heated words and violent gestures,” until “eventually the pieces of his 
 life story began to fit together.” 8 
 
 Wertham and his patient are both telling a story, but they do so dif¬ 
 ferently. Irwin is prompted to tell his story in a certain way, and that 
 telling is structured by the process of analysis provided by the psychiatrist 
 eliciting it. 9 For the doctor, Irwin’s recollections must “fit together” to 
 become a “reasonable” story 7 in that the order of its elements will inevita- 
 
 54 Murder 
 
bly reveal the condition of the patient/storyteller, and that condition in 
 turn will reveal the meaning of the murder. The doctor is therefore creat¬ 
 ing order and meaning both out of disorganized narrative and out of the 
 disorganized personality of his pathologized subject. The desire of the 
 analyst to classify his patient’s pathology, and then —for the protection of 
 society — to coax the patient toward self-recognition of that pathology, is a 
 movement that inevitably disables the free compact of analyst and analy- 
 sand that Freudian analysis is founded upon. 10 Critical to consider here is 
 the particular structure of analysis undertaken as a study of the criminally 
 insane. The whole project of forensic psychiatry as analysis is problematic. 11 
 The act of transference must go awry when the analyst is positioned 
 within the juridical realm. 12 
 
 Contested Narratives: 
 
 The Story of Robert Irwin 
 
 In April 1937, Robert Irwin, an unemployed artist who had been in and 
 out of various institutions for years, 13 murdered his ex-landlady, her adult 
 daughter, and their lodger. Irwin told the police that he had gone to the 
 boardinghouse under the impression that the older daughter, Ethel (his 
 ex-lover), was still living there. It was, he said, Ethel whom he had in¬ 
 tended to kill. After the murder Irwin left town, remaining at large for 
 two months until he gave himself up to the Herald and Examiner in Chi¬ 
 cago. On the occasion of his initial interview by the police, Irwin (who 
 had already engaged a renowned lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz) called Dr. 
 Wertham to ask him to come down to the police station. Irwin had 
 refused to talk to the police until the doctor was present. 14 
 
 Wertham had a long-standing therapeutic relationship with Irwin, hav¬ 
 ing first seen him at Bellevue in October 1932 and continuing to inter¬ 
 view him thereafter throughout the time of Irwin’s stay at various institu¬ 
 tions. Irwin, in fact, had allowed Wertham to interview him before an 
 audience of sixty of the doctor’s esteemed colleagues, although Irwin was 
 present only because he had escaped from the state hospital (to which 
 Wertham dutifully returned him after the meeting). The deliberations of 
 that meeting formed the basis of a paper entitled “Catathymic Crisis: A 
 Clinical Entity” which Wertham delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1936. 15 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 55 
 
The paper was published in a scholarly journal just as Irwin was giving 
 himself up to the Hearst papers in Chicago. 
 
 Irwin and his story therefore had a particular context, a history , before 
 the moment of Irwin’s presentation of his scoop to the Hearst papers. 
 That context was not lost on the press, as a telling bit of doggerel verse 
 suggests: 
 
 it’s all done by mirrors! 
 
 He did not murder anyone 
 And such a charge not nice is: 
 
 He's just the charming victim of 
 A u Catathymic crisis. ” 16 
 
 Naturally, the Hearst papers were as concerned to find an origin and 
 cause for the murders as was Dr. Wertham. They were more inclined, 
 however, to settle on the already conveniently constituted and present 
 body of Robert Irvin, without the messy encumbrance of a psychic his¬ 
 tory into which both responsibility and guilt could be dispersed and lost. 
 
 For the news media, and for the public that formed the circuit of 
 meaning for which the media are both source and conduit, the real boon 
 of the murder story lies in the identification of the murderer, the process 
 of his detection and arrest. (Needless to say, quite apart from the tale, the 
 exposure and confinement of the murderer was an attractive practical 
 prospect.) The narrative lure lay, therefore, in fixing the figure of the 
 murderer — from the early origins of a sketch or profile issued by inves¬ 
 tigating police, through the tracing of his path as he eludes capture, to the 
 revelation of his arrest and, with it, the “capture” of his story. Recon¬ 
 structing the period of the manhunt for Irwin, the crime reporter Quen¬ 
 tin Reynolds wrote: “The hunt and the literature continued (even the lad 
 who had been out with Ronnie [the murdered daughter] on the fatal 
 Saturday night sold his story to a tabloid at twenty-five dollars an instal¬ 
 ment), and now the figure of Robert Irwin began to emerge more clearly.” 17 
 Like every history — whether a life story or that of the psyche — the story 
 is projected backwards, existing as an entity only retroactively. 18 Reynolds 
 describes the construction of Irwin, orthestoty that is Irwin, as a process of 
 reconstruction: the police had “backtracked his life.” 19 What is described 
 
 56 Murder 
 
as revelation is also constitutive: Irwin is both made and found. In this way 
 Irwin, the embodied story, becomes a point of contest. 
 
 Disposable as it is, the doggerel verse above suggests a number of 
 interesting readings. First, there is the struggle between psychiatry and 
 the law for the murderer. The media — fearing the dispersal of blame and 
 the loss of focus on the figure of the murderer — is naturally predisposed 
 to side with the law in wishing to claim Irwin as sane (or he can be mad 
 but not irresponsible ). Their caricature of Wertham’s “Catathymic crisis” 
 shows an anxiety that the dispersal of responsibility will result in the loss 
 of the tale of murder: “He did not murder anyone.” For the media, then, 
 the primary and originating force of the murder must be the act itself. 
 Although this interpretation appears to contradict my previous assertion 
 that the delight of murder lies in fixing the murderer, these are not in¬ 
 compatible theses. The corpse too quickly disappears — murder, like any 
 event, is a transitory thing. The essence of the act can only ever be 
 captured in its author. If the murderer is found to be irresponsibly insane, 
 that vital element of authoring intent is lost and the status of the event is 
 thrown into doubt. The insane murderous act becomes merely a kind of 
 automatic writing, its origins obscure and unintelligible. Then, it is mad¬ 
 ness itself that becomes the subject of scrutiny, not murder. 
 
 The Herostratus Complex: 
 
 Murder as Transcendence 
 
 There is a story to be told about Herostratus that cannot be told: all that 
 points to the real meaning of the act is its outcome. Thus, for Wertham, 
 Herostratus is doubly a cipher, for the origin of his impulse to fame 
 remains veiled: “We know nothing about Herostratus’s personal life, but 
 it is safe to speculate that he must have suffered from some tremendous 
 frustration, some overwhelming inferiority, that made him seek acclaim 
 and punishment at the same time.” 20 Wertham’s use of the Herostratus 
 complex had a particular constructive effect on his telling of the tale that 
 is Irwin, and that telling remade the joint subject of the tale, the doctor 
 himself. Wertham tellingly described psychiatry as “the science of sympa¬ 
 thy.” 21 Wertham and Irwin, analyst and analysand, are intimately tied to 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 57 
 
one another by the act of authoring the story of the subject that is Irwin. 
 As Irw in’s lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz aptly put it, “The Irwin case is the 
 Wertham case.” 22 This echoes Freud’s famous equation, “where it was, 
 there I shall become.” Thus, Wertham’s description of Irwin’s Hero- 
 stratus complex, his desire for undying fame, is not merely a classificatory 
 tactic, it is a parable of transcendence. In attempting to characterize 
 Irw in’s murderous act as a failed strategy 7 of transcendence (the “cata¬ 
 thymic crisis”), the doctor constructs the murder/er as his own fantasy of 
 transcendence. Wertham desires the transcendent (because fixed) meaning 
 of an authoritative interpretation of Irw in’s psychic history. That history 
 w ill in turn explain the crime. Despite his compassion and the generosity 
 of those judiciously dispensed silences through which the story of Irw 7 in 
 appears, Wertham, as analyst, is unable to facilitate the “original pact” 
 of analysis. 23 The triple murder forms the impetus for Wertham’s re¬ 
 construction of the information derived in previous sessions with Irwin. 
 Yet, after the killings, Irwin is less the patient and more the prisoner — 
 awaiting the disposition of the state. Under such conditions, analysis is 
 geared toward ascertaining the danger posed by the patient to society, 
 rather than to himself. That change in the material condition of the 
 narrative of murder has significant ramifications. 
 
 Early in the period of his analysis (before the triple murder), Irwin 
 related to the doctor a dream he had once told his mother: “I dreamt I was 
 walking on a road and an angel came to me and patted me on the head. (I 
 was supposed to be a cute kid.) And the angel said, ‘What do you w r ant?’ 
 And I said, ‘I w 7 ant you.’ ” 24 The story of the angel becomes a particularly 
 mobile metaphor in Wertham’s deployment of the Herostratus complex. 
 On one level, of course, the story 7 points to Irwin’s desire to improve 
 himself, to plug in to the divine: he ‘Vants” the angel; that is to say, he 
 w r ants to become the angel in a clear exchange of identities. But the angel is 
 neuter: Irwin provides no pronoun by which to sex his companion. In 
 Oedipal terms, the angel could be the figure of Laius, struck dowm by the 
 son w 7 ho does not know 7 him. A less simple exchange of identities: “Thou 
 seek’st this man of blood: Thyself art he.” The analy 7 sand, like Oedipus, 
 becomes both murderer and detective. Alternatively, in Orestean terms, 
 the angel becomes the figure of the mother. There is an undeniably 
 threatening tone to the child’s reply to the angel. To say “I w 7 ant y ? ou” is to 
 
 58 Murder 
 
state an impossible violation, an unimaginable violence. How can the 
 child “have” the angel? He can consume or rape the object of his desire, 
 or he can “become” it, and that is all (that is enough). 
 
 In his summation of Irwin’s catathymic disorder, Wertham wrote that 
 “it was to his mother that he wanted to return in the glory of his attain¬ 
 ment.” 25 However, “The alternative between this infantilistic conquest of 
 his mother and elimination of her image by flight or by violence was the 
 secret unconscious blueprint that guided his life. His whole life was a 
 flight from his mother.” 26 Wertham’s proposition that Mrs. Irwin was her 
 son’s object of ultimate desire tends to flatten the complicated lineaments 
 of Irwin’s psychosis. 27 From the story that Irwin himself offered the me¬ 
 dia, the police, his various doctors and, in short, anyone who would listen, 
 it becomes apparent that Irwin’s problem was his inability to separate self 
 from other: a confusion of boundaries that gives rise in turn to that 
 paradoxical formulation of “killing and dying.” 
 
 The two integral tenets of the Herostratus complex that Wertham 
 applies to Irwin are a desire for “glory” and the related urge to “die by 
 killing.” Murder as self-sacrifice has been extensively analyzed in refer¬ 
 ence to the crime of Pierre Riviere (briefly discussed above in Chapter 
 One). 28 Riviere wrote in his memoir not of his intent to kill, but to die: 
 “by my death I should cover myself with glory”; “I should immortalize 
 myself by dying for my father.” 29 This is a paradoxical rendering of the 
 crime: the killings, though logically prior to his own glorious death, and 
 the foundation of all future action and reaction, are effectively banished. 
 Pierre Riviere exemplifies the authorial status of the murderer. Murder is 
 the medium in which he works to make plain his skill and right to fame. 
 And yet, there is also apparent in Riviere’s memoir a determination of 
 what should be — who, in the history of the family, should be subject; who 
 should live. There is a sacrificial element to Riviere’s murderousness. The 
 renovation of his father and his maternal grandmother requires the sacri¬ 
 fice of particular victims, including the not immediately obvious choices: 
 his father’s beloved younger son, and — by implication the last victim — 
 himself. His erasure of the greater part of the bloodline allows its essence 
 to be invested in the remnants: the paternal line. The sum of his mur¬ 
 derous act is therefore not subtraction but addition. Riviere’s decision 
 murderously to reconstruct the family demonstrates his belief that the 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 59 
 
thing itself existed above and beyond its constituent parts. A confusion of 
 subjective boundaries. 
 
 Wertham characterized Irwin’s Herostratus complex as a desire to “seek 
 acclaim and punishment.” Discussing Irwin’s suicidal urge, Wertham 
 noted the young man’s comment that he had “often thought of suicide” 
 but that he had never thought of “killing himself.” Irwin told the doctor 
 that, once, when he had been embarrassed and rebuffed by a girl he had 
 tried to pick up, he was “thinking of killing her and going to the police 
 station and saying ‘Here I am.’ ” 30 When Wertham blandly noted the 
 consistency of Irwin’s “pattern of suicide without killing himself” through 
 various episodes, he colluded in Irwin’s own translation of the urge to kill 
 into the will to die: 
 
 I was living with a nice old lady in Brooklyn and she was just like a mother to me. I 
 was only there two weeks and I was so miserable and so sick that I thought I would 
 commit suicide. But I wasn’t going to kill myself. I thought I would kill her and go 
 to the electric chair. 31 
 
 Irwin recollected several instances of his desire to “kill somebody so I 
 would be hung.” 32 And who appears as the victim of choice in what here 
 must be read as a murderous, not a suicidal, strategy? Women. This is 
 remarkable to Wertham only insofar as the victim conforms to the role of 
 the mother substitute, either by her relationship to Irwin or by her age. 
 Veronica Gedeon’s murder is thus explained: 
 
 Mrs. Gedeon w r as one of those psychological mother-substitutes which recurred 
 throughout the course of his life. Her first name, by which he called her, was the 
 same as his mother’s. Her murder, precipitated by her refusal to let him see Ethel, 
 was in its deeper motivations a symbolic matricide. 33 
 
 The death of the daughter fits this theory less comfortably, but Wertham 
 is able to advance a tentative explanation for both her death and that of 
 the boarder. On the fateful night of the murder, “the original family 
 constellation was repeated.” 34 Ronnie and Frank Byrnes were slaughtered 
 because of their situation as rival “sibling” figures. But did not Ronnie 
 (short for Veronica) also have Irw in’s mother’s name? This girl, toward 
 whom Irwin had always felt “comradely” (in the doctor’s w r ords) becomes, 
 for Wertham, the victim of Irwdn’s “frustration” at not killing the one he 
 wished to kill. But this is no simple surrogate. Irwin’s full statement to the 
 
 60 Murder 
 
police on the night of his surrender to the media shows him as rather less 
 than uninterested in the actual victims: 
 
 Ronnie asked me to sleep with her in July because she was very lonely. I never 
 touched her any time. She stripped for me on another occasion. I gave her a bath 
 once. I stayed with Ronnie for three nights when Ethel and her mother were away 
 and she went around the house half naked.... She fooled around with me a lot.... 
 She was a nice little brainless, blue-eyed blond, a beautiful fluffy thing. 35 
 
 Irwin’s description of Ronnie as “a nice little brainless . . . fluffy thing” 
 stands in contradistinction to Wertham’s appraisal of their relationship as 
 one of equals: “colleagues in art, she a beautiful model, and he an up-and- 
 coming sculptor.” This sanitizing trend in the doctor’s interpretation 
 leads him to demur to Irwin’s assertion that there was no sexual element 
 to the killings. Describing Irwin’s strangling of Ronnie, Wertham assures 
 the reader that “there were no sexual thoughts in Irwin’s mind at that 
 time.” 36 When setting out the circumstances of Irwin’s original state¬ 
 ment, the doctor further notes that Irwin 
 
 almost hit the district attorney when he asked whether Irwin had done anything 
 to Ronnie while she was lying on the bed. He was in a rage at what he evidently 
 thought a horrid accusation: “I didn’t attack either of these two women.” 37 
 
 The sexual element to the crime is absent because of the way in which the 
 sexual is defined. The police and the doctor seemed oblivious to the pro¬ 
 fusion of sexual imagery in Irwin’s own description of the murders. 38 Pos¬ 
 sibly his rage at being accused of rape shows the prisoner was more sensi¬ 
 tive to the excess of meaning in his murder narrative than were his captors. 
 
 Wertham tends to ignore anything in Irwin’s story that does not sit 
 comfortably with his theory of the victim as surrogate. Irwin describes his 
 murder of Mrs. Gedeon: 
 
 She put up a hell of a fight. ... I had Mrs. Gedeon by the throat and I never let 
 loose of that throat for twenty minutes. 
 
 She fell back on the floor with her legs back over her head and her dress over 
 her head. She was all bare. She scratched my face like nobody’s business. When 
 she was on the floor I knew what the damned dog’s place was in that family. 
 
 My face was scratched. My hands were full of blood. I smeared it on her, on her 
 breast. I threw her in the bedroom under the bed. 39 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 61 
 
Just after the description of Ronnie as that “beautiful fluffy thing,” 
 Irwin goes on to tell how, after having held the girl for hours “just so that 
 she could breathe,” he is finally prompted to strangle her: 
 
 I only used my hands, nothing but the pressure of my hands.... I held her for a 
 long time, at least an hour. I was holding her on the bed and strangling her. 
 Afterwards I went out because she immediately became the most repulsive thing I 
 had ever seen in my life when she was dead. It was like just blue death oozing out, a 
 spiritual emanation oozing out. 40 
 
 And, when discussing the original object of his murderous desire, Ethel 
 Gedeon, Irwin told the police: 
 
 I wanted to kill Ethel because I loved her and hated her. Even when I knew' her 
 before when I made a bust of her I was going to model her on a straight block, 
 beheaded with her hair hanging down and her eyes closed. 
 
 If Ethel had come in first I would have killed her and nobody else, if she had 
 come in w'hile I was drawing her mother’s picture. 
 
 I don’t know' whether it was love or hate that made me want to kill Ethel. My 
 choice w'as to either die or to put myself under pressure. 41 
 
 Woman, easily objectified and in a kind of a subjective double bind, 42 can 
 easily become merely a representational figure, a “stand-in.” In Irwin’s 
 case, the selected victim stands in for his owrn death. Wertham, like his 
 patient, tends to put Woman and Death, as interchangeable and related 
 tropes, in the same place. 43 Wertham figures Irwin’s victims as mother 
 surrogate, thus making of the real woman a double cipher. 44 
 
 Here is the slippage between killing and dying, between sacrifice and 
 glory. Irwin’s aim, his choice, is “to die” or to put himself “under pres¬ 
 sure.” The latter is of course achieved by killing, but the ultimate aim of 
 the act is not its external but its internal effect. Just as Irwin tells the angel 
 on the road that his only possible desire is it, his explanation for the 
 murders, framed by Wertham, is predatory and synecdochic. Irwin is 
 creating a new' set of subjective borders: he “wants” the angel; he tries to 
 cut off his penis to distill his energies; 45 he kills the Gedeons, then claims 
 he can re-create them (the pow r er he calls “visualization”) w'hole and 
 entire. Irwin is attempting to gerrymander his physical and psychic lim¬ 
 its to contain the uncontainable and, ironically, to exclude the integral. 
 
 62 Alurder 
 
Irwin’s bizarre strategy of aggregation is obscured by the appellation 
 “Herostratus complex.” 
 
 Wertham’s analysis of his patient’s desire for self-emasculation falls 
 short of Irwin’s complex delimitation of the sexual. The doctor prefers 
 Irwin’s earlier explanation (that he “cut off his penis in order to ‘bottle up 
 his sexual energy’ ”) to the extended rationale — provided, importantly, to 
 another analyst after the murders: “You can say sex is the cornerstone. I 
 wanted to make myself so that I would have an ever present awareness of 
 the fact that I didn’t belong in this scheme of things —so that would 
 always be a goad after me to drive me to what I was doing.” 46 
 
 It is this question of the penis 47 as source and site of sexuality that, 
 therefore, remains surprisingly unexamined. For all that Wertham argues 
 that Irwin was confused in his attack upon his own body (“What was he 
 trying to accomplish? Just to remove his penis as one removes a hat?”), 48 
 the doctor will not entertain, as his patient does, a more complex concept 
 of the sexual. Irwin counters his analyst’s reductionism with a symbolic and 
 negative use of the sexual. Irwin’s self-emasculation was a doomed at¬ 
 tempt to cast out the other, and with it the mechanism of desire itself. That 
 eviction could result in the refiguring of desire, its redefinition in refer¬ 
 ence to lack: present absence, remembered loss. 49 Irwin’s complicated 
 strategy of aggregation and disavowal cannot be reconciled with the 
 dyadic model of object relations to which Wertham adheres. 50 
 
 Nor, in the final analysis, can he allow his patient the luxury of explain¬ 
 ing (thus constructing) himself. Irwin’s insistence that the night of the 
 murder passed him in a “daze,” taking only moments, provided the doc¬ 
 tor with the means to occlude Irwin’s agency as murderer: 51 
 
 Irwin said that during that night he felt as if in a blind alley, in a blue daze, as if it 
 all passed in half an hour. His situation was that of a man walking in a fog who 
 barely sees some of the road. His was a waking dream, a nightmare, instead of a 
 waking reality. 52 
 
 In a sense, Irwin is not present at the time of the murder. His act becomes 
 the consequence of the catathymic crisis: it is authored by delusion. But 
 who is the author of the narrative of delusion? The crux of this issue of 
 authority is demonstrated by Wertham’s willingness to position himself 
 as the arbiter of meaning: 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 63 
 
Speaking of the night before Easter Sunday, 1937, Irwin said “every bit of it was 
 accidental.” That was a sincere statement. He intended to annihilate Ethel —and 
 instead killed three other people. But when he uses the term “accidental” that 
 means only that the causes, the design, were hidden from him. If one understands 
 the conscious and unconscious workings of the mind there are layers of patterns 
 woven into one another. 53 
 
 Wertham clearly suggests that he understands. As Irwin’s interpreter, the 
 doctor gathers together disparate and hidden clues to create continuity 
 for a definitive story of the analysand’s psyche, becoming in the process 
 coauthor of the narrative of murder. Wertham’s odd incuriosity regarding 
 Irwin’s own complex explanations of “self” illustrates the degree to which 
 the analyst is himself engaged in the re-creation — through reeducation — 
 of the subject under analysis. For Irwin, killing and dying are parallel 
 strategies of liberation. For the doctor they are merely different manifes¬ 
 tations of a ruling pathology: repeated shorts in the circuit of catathymia. 
 
 Whose Story? 
 
 Irwin gives every indication of knowing the effect upon him of the co¬ 
 option, particularly by the news media, of his story. 54 Yet these stories, 
 and most particularly the “reasonable” murder story authored by the 
 analyst, establish the conditions of possibility for Irwin’s owm account. 
 
 In an eloquent moment of doubling, Irwin explains the circumstance of 
 his conversion to the genre of true crime. The crime story only came to 
 interest him when he became its subject: “I never read these detective- 
 story magazines until I saw my picture in one. When I read in Cleveland 
 that my mother had died, I wanted to end it all then. I wanted to give 
 myself up to Walter Winchell, but I didn’t have the carfare.” 55 The signif¬ 
 icant core of this passage is Irwin’s sense of himself as a story. Naturally he 
 wishes to direct the progress of the tale, whether that be toward closure 
 (death) or, better still, syndication (Walter Winchell). There is quite 
 some distance between Cleveland (where, reading of his mother’s death, 
 he, too, wants to die) and Chicago, w'here his surrender results in the 
 Hearst papers scoop, converting the saleable property of Robert Irwin 
 into a proliferation of bylines. The end of the journey for Irwin (Cleve- 
 
 64 Murder 
 
land to Chicago) is not death, but fame. The story is what counts, and it 
 cannot end too soon. 
 
 If we consider Irwin’s selfless reason for seeking out the Hearst press 
 (that he wanted to use the fee to “help his two brothers; one who was in 
 jail and the other he thought was a dope addict”) to be sincere, 56 then, 
 arguably, we must do away with the spectre of Herostratus altogether. But 
 that would be a little premature. The Herostratus complex itself needs to 
 be reread. The desire for glory, or fame, is not the core concept of the 
 complex: it is the will to become a story. It is this that explains Irwin’s 
 metaphorical journey from Cleveland to Chicago — from death to syn¬ 
 dication. The money that Irwin obtained from his story went toward 
 continuing his “work on visualization.” 57 Although the ultimate aim of 
 “visualization” was to lose himself in the divine, in practice it was a device 
 to improve his mimetic capabilities — to refine recollection to the point 
 where he could effectively reconstruct the object of reference in its com¬ 
 plex entirety. Thus he wished to move from the re-creation of the two- 
 dimensional artifact (i.e., to recall to mind exactly a photograph or paint¬ 
 ing) to the ability to rerun movies mentally and, finally, to the re-creation 
 of whole objects and scenes. This movement out from the “flat” dimen¬ 
 sional perspective to the appearance and then the reality of depth is a 
 significant one. It represents to Irwin that “living memory” is not just 
 representative but —through “visualization” — actually constructive. Ir¬ 
 win confused mimesis with creation, believing, for instance, that his kill¬ 
 ings had merely “borrowed” the lives of the Gedeons, and that his “visu¬ 
 alizing” powers would redeem them. 58 For Irwin, description could, be 
 converted into the thing itself—thus his choice to journey not toward 
 death, but to syndication. 
 
 In the final chapter of The Show of Violence Wertham ponders the meaning 
 of murder in contemporary society. Murder represents a two-way mir¬ 
 ror-allowing access to the most intimate workings of the individual and 
 of “human nature” 59 while also exposing the dominant moral and ideo¬ 
 logical structures of society (“Tell me what murders are committed and 
 what is done about them and I’ll tell you what society you live in”). 60 
 Murder assumes a metaphorical status. 
 
 In the various case studies of The Show of Violence murder is symptom¬ 
 atic both of individual and social pathology. While Irwin’s individual 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 65 
 
pathology was a focal point of the doctor’s analysis, Wertham did not 
 neglect to blame a society sick with endemic unemployment and bureau¬ 
 cratic indifference. Wertham accepted, without qualification, Irwin’s own 
 petulant defense: “You know, I’m an unfortunate young fellow who tried 
 to get on in the world and couldn’t.” 61 By its willful indifference, society 
 reinscribes the closed circuit of the catathymic crisis, refusing to develop 
 and reward those talents which might have forestalled the onset of that 
 crisis. Irwin could find no job and could not support the pursuit of his 
 sculpture; consequently, the depressive cycle (aggravated by insufficient 
 or misguided institutional supervision) led inexorably to a crisis. 
 
 Wertham’s identification of the need (and thus the right) to work and 
 the necessity of self-expression can be taken as evidence of the degree to 
 which his Weltanschauung was informed by the humanism of European 
 democratic socialism, rather than that of American liberalism. 62 Irrespec¬ 
 tive of this evidence, his interrogation of the interdependence of individ¬ 
 ual and social pathology that gives rise to murder is a humanistic and 
 positivistic one. It is founded upon the belief that murder— as a social and 
 psychological phenomenon — tells the story of “human nature,” albeit a 
 nature which is historically determined. 
 
 Like most explanations of human nature, we find this to be a gendered 
 account. The human capital of Robert Irwin, squandered by depression 
 America with such violent results, is inescapably masculine. It is worth¬ 
 while here to make a comparison of Wertham’s analysis of Irwin with that 
 of his final case study: a “modern Medea” whom Wertham called, simply, 
 “Mary.” 63 The doctor became involved with Mary’s case, like Irwin’s, 
 during the depression when he was called by the court to provide a 
 psychological assessment of the prisoner. Mary was facing a charge of 
 first-degree murder, and the enmity of her community, for slitting the 
 throat of her seven-year-old daughter and partially burning the body. She 
 unsuccessfully tried to dispose of her younger son by slitting his throat, 
 but he survived and was taken into care. Wertham found Mary to be of 
 “lower than average intelligence,” and eventually he successfully argued 
 to the court that her charge be reduced because of “diminished respon¬ 
 sibility.” The judge, seizing upon what, for many experts, still remains a 
 convenient description for the violence of mothers toward their chil¬ 
 dren, 64 accepted this advice and added his own two bits worth on Mary’s 
 lack of volition to do wrong. 
 
 66 Murder 
 
Wertham saw Mary’s crime as the result of social injustice (her inability 
 to afford sufficient child care; indifference on the part of the child welfare 
 authorities to whom she went for help) and personal weakness (Mary’s 
 “borderline intelligence” proved insufficient for her to think her way out 
 of the problem of the children, while also contributing to her selfishness, 
 suggestibility, and hedonism). In contrast to Wertham’s conception of the 
 needs that were denied Irwin by society — rights constructed as ungen¬ 
 dered and universal — the needs denied Mary are determined by her sex, 
 as his use of her mythic precursor makes clear: “Medea expresses, in a case 
 where the consequences are of extreme horror, a struggle for women’s 
 rights which are not in conflict with motherhood but [are] a demand for 
 the fulfillment of motherhood without all the unjust sacrifices of individ¬ 
 ual self-expression.” 65 Wertham interprets Mary’s murderous act through 
 the prism of a narrow reading of the tragedy of Medea. What might an 
 alternative reading offer? We should consider Medea’s choice of victims 
 as both strategic and determined. What prompts her to kill her children 
 (her husband’s heirs) is not jealousy as such, but her inability to attain the 
 status of citizen-wife. It is her position as foreigner that provokes her to 
 attack the status of her husband in the figure of his children (who stand to 
 accede to the realm of power from which she is excluded). As a foreigner, 
 she cannot figure as a wife (only mistress), and murder becomes merely a 
 radical reenactment of what is an already existing social sanction. If we 
 move the focus of the Medea myth from that of her identity as a wronged 
 woman and mother to that of a disenfranchised outsider, an alternative 
 reading for Mary’s murder of her daughter appears, and with it quite a 
 different social critique. 
 
 In her own testimony, and that of her immigrant boyfriend, 66 Mary 
 appears to fulfill the tasks of motherhood adequately, but without (in 
 Wertham’s view) great enthusiasm. The doctor notes that her sole mo¬ 
 ment of animation in interviews was when she talked about how she loved 
 to dance, and the lack of her opportunities for doing so. On a minimal 
 benefit, supplemented by the equally meager earnings of her laborer 
 boyfriend, Mary could not afford alternative care for her son and daugh¬ 
 ter. Her life was ruled by her child-care responsibilities. For Wertham, 
 then, the conditions in which Mary found herself (without state support 
 in a depression economy) were not conducive to her properly assuming 
 the duties of motherhood. In a just society, Mary could presumably reap 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 67 
 
the joys of motherhood. But there is little evidence in Wertham’s account 
 of her early marriage that the children were either wanted or planned. 67 It 
 is not, therefore, merely a matter of reconciling the secondary need for 
 “individual self-expression” with the “fulfillment” of that more “funda¬ 
 mental” identity of motherhood. The doctor colludes with the very con¬ 
 struct he derides by prioritizing his patient’s role as mother, naturalizing 
 motherhood per se. Just as a strict social and familial hierarchy deter¬ 
 mined the fate of Medea by forbidding her a place within that system, 68 
 Mary’s fate is determined by the insistence of her culture not just that she 
 mother .; but that she be a mother. 
 
 Mary sought to shake off that obligation. Faithful to the anecdotal 
 wisdom of dreams, Wertham relates a dream scenario told him by Mary: 
 “Some girl was starting to run away from home and she just seemed to 
 say, ‘Well, I won’t be coming back.’ The girl was running away. They had 
 a rope and tangled her and caught her by the feet, and she fell down. 
 A crowd started to gather and people came for her and took her back 
 home.” 69 Wertham reads the dream merely as wish fulfillment: her desire 
 for escape. But the nightmare elements of the dream invite a closer read¬ 
 ing. Unlike the clearly defined “I” that is the predatory subject in Irwin’s 
 dream of the angel, Mary dreams of “some girl”: a subject that is simulta¬ 
 neously object and other. The subject of Mary’s dream of escape is chased 
 by a faceless “they” and brought to heel before “a crowd.” She is roped 
 like straying cattle, signifying her value to others as lost property. And the 
 place to which she is returned is “home”: her place of imprisonment, not 
 the private sanctum of happy domesticity. If this is a dream of escape, it is 
 also eloquent testimony to its impossibility. 
 
 Wertham’s discussion of Mary demonstrates the false unity of the con¬ 
 cept of human nature and, likewise, the uncomplicated fallacy of human 
 frailty that leads to murder. Within the supposedly unified category 7 of 
 the “human,” sexual difference marks out the subspecies of “woman”: 
 difference visible only in and as Woman. That difference bespeaks the 
 vigor of a century-old conceptualization of women’s biological nature as 
 in itself pathological — as other than the human norm, implicidy male. 70 
 
 Dr. Wertham’s “narratives of crime” describe a “magic of murder” that is 
 both spectacle and sign. 71 The use of mythic narrative to structure the 
 stories of murder contained in his case studies produces meanings in 
 
 68 Murder 
 
excess of his intent (to demonstrate the ability of forensic psychiatry to 
 predict, qualitatively, dangerousness). The raw data of violence are re¬ 
 authored by the expert to make sense out of chaos: to take the social 
 meaning out of an individual act. The interpretive act of reauthoring the 
 murder narrative is what establishes authority in the tale of murder. The 
 process of interpretation is a thing in itself, distinct from the reason for 
 which the tale is told, distinct even from its subject. In later chapters, I 
 shall be examining the degree to which the ostensible subject of the tale 
 can disappear, even when his or her reconstruction is the core project of 
 the tale’s author. 72 That reauthoring act is particularly explicit in the case 
 of Dr. Wertham (as distinct from the “case of Robert Irwin”). In forensic 
 psychiatry the “original pact” of analysis is broken by a structure that 
 bestows upon the analyst the authority of judge. 
 
 The Cannibal State: 
 
 Murder and Execution in Star Wormwood 
 
 “His father would nuzzle his neck and say that he would eat him. Roger 
 would cry delightedly that he couldn’t. Father replied that he could but 
 he wouldn’t, and when this had gone on a satisfying length of time, Roger 
 would clinch the argument: ‘You couldn’t. I’m too big. Part of me would 
 stick out.’ ” 73 The parable of the “eating game” is an allusion to the 
 circumstances of the crime for which Roger Haike is executed: his eating 
 of the arm of the young woman he has accidentally killed. 74 More impor¬ 
 tant, the parable of the “eating game” foreshadows the social critique 
 leveled by the liberal judge. Although he deplores the hypocrisy of a 
 taboo against cannibalism in a society where we daily “eat our neighbors 
 in spirit or in mind,” Bok primarily aims his metaphor at the punitive 
 state. 75 The juridical game of capital sentencing leads the state to devour 
 its children. 76 Bok suggests it was Roger Haike’s “unique fate to starve or 
 be eaten.” 77 
 
 In common with both Wright’s Native Son and Motley’s Knock on Any 
 Door .; Bok’s work has a concern with the failure of the state, and its institu¬ 
 tions, to minister to the rights and needs of its marginal citizens. Yet Bok’s 
 treatise has more in common with Wertham’s The Show of Violence than 
 with the works discussed in the previous chapter. Although the factual 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 69 
 
basis of Bok’s work is less overt than Wertham’s, its truth claims are not. 
 Like Wertham, Bok is an apostle of the science of mind, and his project is 
 founded upon his confidence in the expertise of forensic psychiatry —a 
 confidence that mirrors his own, albeit self-critical, professionalism. 
 
 With a classically liberal concern for balancing the rights and obli¬ 
 gations of the citizen with the interests of the rule of law, Bok uses 
 the devoured child as a sign of the fundamentally inequitable basis of 
 the social contract. In a secular world, the state — though lacking both 
 the omnipotence and omniscience of God and the symbolic authority of 
 the monarch — still has the power of life and death over its subjects. The 
 state’s failure either to maintain the compassion of conscience necessary 
 to rule (in the liberal mind) or to plumb accurately the conscience of its 
 citizens is most clearly exposed in its juridical and punitive functions. Bok 
 seeks to dramatize the cost of such a rule of law for America in its second 
 “century' of progress.” The novel structure of the treatise pairs prose 
 narrative with analymc commentary; the analytic power of social criticism 
 supposedly' demystifies the lyrical fiction of the murder narrative. The 
 persistence of the mystery', however, seems to be a function of the narrative 
 of murder. The fiction and “commentary” of Bok’s Star Worm-wood read 
 against one another, not as companion pieces. The different fates of these 
 two texts within one attest eloquently to the overwhelmingly symbolic 
 power of punishment — and of capital punishment in particular. 
 
 Over the past century and a half, more than two-thirds of American 
 states have legislatively allowed for, and carried out, the death penalty by 
 a variety of means. 78 Legal homicide has been interpreted by its propo¬ 
 nents as a strategy for deterrence, punishment and, by its more acute 
 supporters, as a mechanism to control the potentially anarchic effects of 
 private vengeance. 79 The self-evidence of such ideas is continually ques¬ 
 tioned by the opponents of capital punishment. Whatever the method¬ 
 ological acrobatics of its defenders, for instance, evidence proving con¬ 
 clusively that effectiveness of the death penalty' as deterrence just cannot 
 be found. 80 The siege upon the system of legal homicide (culminating in a 
 five-year federal ban on the practice in the late 1960s and early ’70s) 
 seems to have been rhetorically effective but materially impotent. The 
 death penalty remains very' much a part not just of judicial and penal 
 administration but of American culture at large. It is the importance of 
 
 70 Murder 
 
capital punishment as a political phenomenon, as a social practice, and as 
 a symbolic event , that ensures its maintenance. Indeed, we have witnessed a 
 revival of faith in its benefits since the early 1980s 81 —despite a marked 
 decrease in urban homicide rates in the past four to five years. 82 The persistence 
 of capital punishment is best explained by the seductiveness, in the Amer¬ 
 ican context, of the concept of just and fitting punishment. Its revival, 
 however, is attributable to more immediate trends in stricter law-and- 
 order legislation and the significant explosion in prison populations. The 
 “tough on crime” approach lends itself to expedience. One could charac¬ 
 terize (my apologies for the reductionism) that line of thought: there are 
 too many criminals, and too many nonviolent criminals, in American 
 prisons, so why not make room at the extreme end (rather than attending 
 to the problem of jail terms for minor offenses) by obliterating the most 
 violent offenders. While that might be the logistics of the revival, its 
 symbolic core is, however, quite another matter. 
 
 The idea of meeting force with force finds its enunciation in law, in 
 military strategy, in political rhetoric, and in the language of the mar¬ 
 ketplace. Just as the law of self-defense allows for the use of lethal force in 
 situations where one entertains the reasonable belief that one’s life is in 
 peril, and where one has “no duty to retreat,” the idea of defense of the 
 social body by deployment of the most extreme sanction has a ring of 
 equitable justice about it. 83 The relative ascendance over the past thirty 
 years of the “problem of crime” in the hierarchy of public concerns has 
 only made the doctrine of justifiable homicide, and its equivalent in judi¬ 
 cial homicide, a more acceptable response. 84 
 
 One aim of this book is a weighing of the relationship between murder 
 and execution as cultural signs. 85 The fascination with closure in the 
 murder narrative is probably most clearly visible in representations of 
 capital homicide. When the life of the murderer is at stake, the anticipa¬ 
 tion of his/her death provides a dramatic counterweight to the tale of 
 murder itself. Opponents of the death penalty have argued that there is 
 no ethical distinction between homicide and state-sponsored execution, 
 and that the old biblical adage of “a life for a life” cannot ever, in prac¬ 
 ticality, represent parity or a just exchange. 86 Yet the balance between a 
 life (or more) maliciously taken and the taking of the life of the killer is an 
 idea that continues to fascinate Americans, a fascination that partly ac- 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 71 
 
counts for the longevity of the death penalty. Ironically, that “balance” is 
 treated as a necessary fiction both by the legislatures administering capital 
 punishment 87 and by the public at large. 88 
 
 Curtis Bok’s story of Roger Haike is very loosely based upon that of a 
 young man executed for the murder of a woman in Pennsylvania in 1931. 
 Roger’s story is simple but suspiciously interpretable, as his jury dis¬ 
 covers. Undernourished for most of his early life, the leaner years of the 
 Depression throw Roger into a state of insatiable hunger. He learns how 
 to snare rabbits from his only friend, a taciturn boy like himself, bearing a 
 similar last name, Joe Hake. Roger, who minds his own business, does not 
 know that Joe has been having an incestuous affair with his younger sister, 
 Angela, Joe’s “well-formed” and “evil” seducer. 89 Unfortunately, this se¬ 
 cret eventually unravels into Roger’s life when Joe, sick of the tyranny of 
 his sister’s sexual demands, revenges himself upon her by not withdraw¬ 
 ing at ejaculation. In a fury, Angela flees the house, determined to exact 
 her own revenge upon men in general. 90 Coincidentally, she runs to the 
 school and finds Roger, who has just begun work there as a caretaker. She 
 surprises him as he is about to retrieve a rabbit he has been roasting 
 (against the rules) in the furnace; alarmed, he drops his precious meal into 
 the coals to burn. Seeing her opportunity for revenge, Angela threatens 
 to tell the school authorities what he has done. To convince her other¬ 
 wise, Roger — always short on words — takes hold of her “in order to stop 
 her from leaving and prevent her from talking or making noise.” This 
 intervention only increases Angela’s fury, as “the last thing she could 
 abide was constriction of any kind.” She begins to scream, and Roger, 
 who hates loud or sudden noise, loses “all control except the will to stop” 
 that “dreadful noise.” 91 He throttles her and then, wdiile trying to shake 
 some sense into her, accidentally breaks her neck. When he realizes that 
 her sudden silence is not a sign of acquiescence, but a more permanent 
 capitulation, he panics and tries to shove her body into the furnace. It will 
 not all fit, so w’hen the head and shoulders have partially burned he tries 
 to wedge the corpse in farther, burning himself in the process. He licks at 
 the w r ound and finds some of the girl’s cooked flesh in his mouth. That 
 savor revives his hunger and he numbly gnaws away at the partially 
 cooked arm. Horrified by what he has found himself doing, he vomits and 
 flees, giving no further thought to the concealment of the crime. Signifi¬ 
 cantly, the “evidence” left behind him includes the semen in Angela’s 
 
 72 Murder 
 
body, remnant of her brother’s recent revenge upon her. This final trace 
 will clinch the monstrosity of the case against Roger, as he is indicted for 
 rape-murder. 
 
 When Roger languishes in jail, the appearance of his lawyer evinces in 
 him a wistful faith in the figure of a protector: part liege, part mother, part 
 father: 92 “A memory from his childhood made him cry out: ‘Are you 
 going to take care of me?’ ” 93 Roger is a child involved in an adult game, 
 the rules of which he does not know. 94 The benevolent state is repre¬ 
 sented by the figures of lawyer and psychiatrist: the Good Mother, the 
 Good Father. While Roger is riding the train to the state penitentiary, he 
 considers his need to have his lawyer as witness to the execution: “He 
 wanted Morris. He wanted to keep hold of him to the end, as if he were 
 thread and continuity, the only thing that could abide and make a final, 
 rounded experience, short and twisted as it was. He needed continuity: 
 otherwise he would be lost and broken.” 95 This “continuity” is wrapped 
 in cultural meanings of the maternal. The lawyer as mother represents 
 nurturance, sustenance, and understanding. But it is the figure of Dr. 
 Danby, the psychiatrist, that comes to represent a generative paternity. 
 
 Despite the defeating experience that is his lot in the murder trial, 
 Roger undergoes a certain regeneration through the necessity of explain¬ 
 ing himself, of making himself heard. That regeneration is a move from out 
 of silence to articulacy. What is more, that movement represents the 
 progress toward a potentially greater humanity: “Had Roger lived to 
 maturity, he might have seen that his fumbling between noise and quiet 
 was the ancient battleground of man.” 96 But where, finally, does Roger’s 
 newly discovered voice come from? 
 
 Facing conviction for rape-murder and the monolithic hatred of media 
 and community, Roger is “sparse of words” at a time when they are indis¬ 
 pensable. Although Morris is able to get Roger’s story out of him, it seems 
 unlikely that he will be able to get the boy to retell that story to a more 
 hostile audience in court. Morris also wants more to the story: not what 
 the boy cannot speak, but what he does not know. Eliciting that supplemen¬ 
 tary story becomes the responsibility of Dr. Danby, 97 the alienist: 
 
 Danby hypnotized him, got what he wanted, woke Roger up, and told him what 
 he had said. It was then not difficult for Roger to accept what he was told he had 
 said and soon to say it again in his own words. 98 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 73 
 
Roger’s voice, then, comes from his unconscious, alheit by way of the 
 authority of the alienist. This ambiguity becomes more apparent as 
 Roger, after sentencing, contemplates his progress to speech: 
 
 For months he had wrestled with the strange problems of his case.... He had had 
 to become articulate, which was against his nature, and he had said more words 
 than he knew existed. They had done him no good." 
 
 Leaving aside for a moment that vital knowledge of the failure of speech, 
 let us concentrate on the paradoxical project of Roger’s articulacy. How 
 can he utter “more words than he knew existed”? This is not merely 
 semantical quibbling, but indicates the problematic status to speech when 
 it is gained only through an intermediary voice: that of the psychiatrist. 
 The words that Roger speaks but does not know have a meaning veiled 
 but present; therefore he speaks in his own voice. However, the larger 
 project of Bok’s treatise works against such a reading by positing as prior 
 and re/generative the healing intervention of the psychiatrist. 
 
 While the progress of Roger toward speech speaks of Bok’s faith in the 
 “civilizing” precepts of psychiatry 7 , Bok makes even more general claims 
 for the social utility 7 of psychiatry 7 : “The penology of the future is treat¬ 
 ment.” The occasional divergences of law from justice can be explained 
 by the degree to which law as a system, and legal formalism in particular, 
 reifies fact and makes man immanent, the transparent vessel of lawful or 
 unlawful intent. Bok hopes that the law, like psychiatry 7 , will recognize the 
 mind’s opacity, enabling a return to moral legal government: “If we let 
 our ideals escape into systems, we are moving toward that dangerous 
 area w here a thing and the name of a thing get mixed up.” 100 The confu¬ 
 sion of the “thing and the name of a thing” demonstrates the law’s ten¬ 
 dency to valorize “fact.” Psychiatry, however, does not dare rely upon that 
 self-evidence: 
 
 Freud has set a great wind blowing in man’s mind. ... In the law 7 this is a tough 
 cross-wind, and it is driving the profession to regard facts as icebergs, complete 
 with large underbodies which must be examined. 101 
 
 Although Bok questions the tenets of a formalistic legal positivism, he 
 cannot escape from positivism itself. There is a truth to be found, if only 
 by looking more deeply —looking, indeed, for the rational man, that ideal 
 subject of liberal thought: 
 
 74 Murder 
 
[T]he importance and effect of free will are becoming less and less as a person’s 
 early influences and motivations are revealed. Psychiatry can show their grip upon 
 him to explain his past action and, by helping him to understand his plight, free 
 him from similar pitfalls in the future. As man develops in moral caliber, his 
 choice of the right action will become increasingly automatic. And as psychiatry 
 develops its techniques, it will increasingly help him to clear the path to in¬ 
 stinctive choice. 102 
 
 The mind is knowable — given the correct and refined instrument of mea¬ 
 surement. And man, ultimately, is perfectible. 
 
 The law as Good Father “bends an attentive ear” to the “difficult 
 problems” of those on the rocky path to perfection. 103 The metaphorical 
 equivalent of Roger’s articulacy is law’s sensitivity to that still, small voice. 
 The critical edge to the commentary section is blunted by its faith in the 
 regenerative powers of the state and the moral paternity of law. More 
 important, though, Bok’s optimism is undermined by the resolution of 
 the story of Roger’s move from silence to speech. What, after all, is the 
 net result of those words that had “done him no good”? 
 
 Roger’s fate is announced in court by the “terrible words” of his jurors 
 convicting him of first-degree murder. Later, during sentencing, the 
 judge reiterates those “dreadful words” of punishment. Despite speaking 
 “more words than he knew existed” in his own defense, the law has the 
 last word. Roger’s newly found voice, in the form of his testimony, pro¬ 
 vides the law with its authority to annihilate the speaker. Bok is at pains to 
 point out the difference between law at its best —“bending a troubled 
 ear” to the knotty problems of the psyche — and the dead letter of the law 
 that produces judgment without moral authority. The law that condemns 
 Roger has a great battery of words, but its heart is silent, a silence mani¬ 
 fest in the “remote and bloodless language” of the decision of the state 
 supreme court to refuse certiorari in Roger’s case: “it sounded as if some¬ 
 one had taken the case into the desert and left it there.” That disconnec¬ 
 tion is further symbolized by the governor’s departure, on the eve of the 
 execution, to go sailing in a yacht with no ship-to-shore telephone. 104 
 The opposition of silence to speech in Star Wormwood produces a mean¬ 
 ing in excess of the logos of that pairing. Generally figured by Bok as the 
 subordinate and less desirable quality in the pairing, silence comes out 
 “on top” elsewhere. What, after all, is Roger’s “nature” but to be taciturn, 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 75 
 
“sparse of words”? His foray into speech does not save him. Awaiting 
 execution Roger “grew ever more silent”: 
 
 It was comforting to be quiet and not racked by words and questions ... and the 
 same continence in language kept him from reading. l0S 
 
 Roger’s “continence in language” is self-defense: silence holds him to¬ 
 gether. His reticence overlays presence , while the noisy silence of law 
 protects only absence. 
 
 The principal metaphorical forms of the work converge at the moment 
 of Roger’s return to his “natural” silence in prison —a silence ratified 
 by the undemanding, comforting presence of his lawyer, Morris Longa. 
 This figuring of the Law as Mother presents a counterweight to the 
 Law as Father —the psychiatrist’s ushering of Roger into the realm of 
 speech. 106 Morris Longa is complicit in Roger’s return to reticence: 
 
 Morris gave him what solace he could and went away. He didn’t try to make an 
 occasion of his coming or to find subjects of conversation, for he realized what it 
 was that Roger got from him and knew it was no dependence on time or words. 107 
 
 Roger gets from the presence of Morris something that has “no depen¬ 
 dence on time or words,” suggesting Roger’s return to the pre-Oedipal 
 Feminine, that space prior to speech. Roger is afraid, entering the death 
 chamber, that he has been deserted. He fears that he must approach death 
 alone, and the grief rising in him has the inexpressible want of the infant: 
 
 [T]he black door opened to let them enter the death room, and closed behind 
 them. He wanted to call out Morris’s name, but his mouth was dry and he could 
 utter no sound. There was no word for him either, and his spirit sank to its lowest 
 point. He had been deserted. 108 
 
 Bok’s expression “There was no word for him” means literally that no one 
 greeted the boy, but it also suggests the uselessness of language to Roger: 
 he neither has the word nor can be called by it. Here the disobliging instability 
 of the subject before/within language is indicated by the sanctions im¬ 
 posed by the Law as Father upon the Law r as Mother. Morris Longa, who 
 arrived too late to see the boy in his cell, is attendant upon the execution. 
 He wants to call out to Roger but is constrained by the rules not to do so. 
 Eventually, however, Morris does speak, against the rules: “The rule was 
 
 76 Murder 
 
silence, and Morris had not dared to speak before, in fear of being ex¬ 
 cluded or even ejected from the room.” 109 As Morris speaks the words 
 “I’m here,” he symbolically demolishes the silencing authority of the Law 
 as (Bad) Father. That “I’m here” is a declaration of maternal authority — 
 the power to comfort the inexpressible want of the infant by presence 
 alone. But that declaration brings with it the penalty of “exclusion,” of 
 “ejection.” The Law as Mother is anathema to the Law as Father. It must 
 be cast out for the Law as Father to pose successfully as Law: an un¬ 
 differentiated and objective authority. 
 
 The metaphor of the devouring parent — law that consumes not just its 
 subjects but its own heart — is associated with Bok’s metaphorical opposi¬ 
 tion between noise and silence. Bok inadvertently reinscribes the mystery 
 of murder during his analysis of the faults of the system that penalizes 
 it. That mystery returns in the form of metaphor, the troping mecha¬ 
 nism that cannot be equaled by Bok’s analytic commentary. The problem 
 of silence remains. What is at the heart of silence? What inhabits its 
 depths? 
 
 Given this reinscription of the mystery of murder, what must become 
 of Bok’s belief that crime, as a “disease of civilization,” can be “studied” 
 and remedied? The psychiatrist’s ability to explain the “deviation” of the 
 murderous criminal from “mankind’s moderate average madness” is an 
 illusive mastery. 110 Roger lives, kills, and dies in a world of speakers who 
 do not mean what they say, where words are powerless to save him. Bok 
 has faith in the power of forensic psychiatry to discriminate between 
 “incorrigibles” and those who can be redeemed by treatment. 111 Al¬ 
 though Bok deplores capital punishment, he allows for a category of 
 “incorrigibles” — those whose minds can never be brought to order, 
 whose motives are inscrutable. These are “fit” subjects for execution: 
 “mad dogs” who do not “always snarl and foam at the mouth.” 112 That 
 exception to Bok’s humanitarian rule testifies to the importance of the 
 symbolic power of execution. Execution offers the satisfaction of (false) 
 closure: the violent answer to the unanswerable question of madness. In 
 Bok’s own text the vision of rationality and order is self-defeating. The 
 precise vision of psychiatry turns out to be particularly fixed and partial. 
 Like the thick glass of the train window through which Roger can see 
 only at its center — momentarily capturing glimpses of the landscape he is 
 
 Min(d)ing the Murderer 77 
 
passing —psychiatry provides a view that is both brief and partial, cap¬ 
 tured at the very moment it is already lost. 
 
 Star Wormwood and The Show of Violence are texts that claim for themselves 
 an adjudicatory role, weighing the status and value of forensic psychiatry 
 and its impact upon due process and penology. They undergo a kind of 
 slippage, their determined aim deflected by a narrative of murder the 
 direction of which they, finally, cannot control. Wertham’s narratives 
 arise from real subjects, his patients under analysis. His retelling of their 
 stories is therefore explicitly interventionist and constructive. His tale 
 mystifies as much as it enlightens, like the mythic narratives he uses to 
 establish his psychotic archetypes. Both Wertham and Bok insist that the 
 “penology of the future is treatment.” 113 Their rational projects founder, 
 the mystery 7 of murder reappearing within their own (and their subjects’) 
 intricate processes of interrogation and interpretation. The meaning of a 
 particular murderous act is not stable, its instability 7 ensured by the un¬ 
 acknowledged narrative function of classification. The meaning of mur¬ 
 der as excess returns in the mobility 7 of metaphor that is the heart of both 
 sociological tracts. For Wertham and Bok, the act of murder becomes a 
 point of reference for the determination of the ethical character of the 
 murderer. Their determination whether that act was consistent with, or a 
 departure from, what is constituted and an ethical nature is an important 
 function of the reauthoring act. This book is a critique of authority 7 in the 
 tale of murder generally. Yet it is also, unavoidably, a narrative with its 
 owm authoritative terms and author. While I have been preoccupied in 
 this chapter with the co-option of the subject of the tale by its interpreter, 
 I will next be discussing the disposition of the subject of the tale of 
 murder w hen its reauthoring is accomplished not by a single interpreter, 
 but by a chorus of commentators. Along with my return to the issue of the 
 subject, my owm status as author also comes under scrutiny — prefatory 7 to 
 the final chapter’s critique of the self-reflexive nature of the tale of murder 
 generally. 
 
 78 Murder 
 
4. True Crime Romance I: 
 A Genre Defiled 
 
 Love is just an episode in a man’s life, but it is the very life of a woman. 
 
 Herbert Rosenberg , Defense Attorney 
 
 My story is a love story. Martha Jule Beck 
 
 The retired assistant district attorney of Nassau County, New York, 
 Henry (“Hank”) Devine, remembers Martha Jule Beck well, although he 
 met her only once. At the special appeal session convened in the death 
 cells at Sing Sing, he recalls Mrs. Beck’s stare as she triumphandy told the 
 assembled lawyers: “[TJhere’s just one difference between you and me: I 
 know when I'm going.” 1 Hank Devine is still an imposing man, although 
 his stature has diminished under the depredations of old age. His walking 
 cane is placed before him on the polished wooden table of the law library, 
 and the high gloss of that table is accentuated by pale autumnal sunlight. 
 Mr. Devine’s voice is boisterous in the quiet. I, too, am excited: able to 
 talk, at last, to one of the principals in a case that has, till now, consisted 
 entirely of depositions, transcripts, and books of evidence. The library 
 in which we sit is not thirty miles away from the cellar in which Ray 
 Fernandez buried Janet Fay’s body, wrapped in Martha’s pink chenille 
 nightgown. 
 
 Mr. Devine seems glad of an opportunity to talk about the “Honey¬ 
 moon Killers.” The case was a sensation in its day, a real circus. Yet his 
 enthusiasm is not tempered by the perspicacity of mind for which he was 
 known in his heyday at the Office of the Nassau County District At¬ 
 torney. Details slip and recur. Yes, he remembers what Martha looked 
 like: she was a “big girl,” maybe “300 pounds or so,” and, he tells me with 
 
curmudgeonly charm, “not nearly as pretty as you.” She decorated her 
 cell with paper chains. She was an “intelligent woman” (meaning she 
 should have known better). But it is the modus operandi of the killers that 
 really fascinates. Devine repeatedly returns to the state in which the body 
 was found, curled up tightly and buried beneath the concrete floor of the 
 cellar in the South Ozone house. 2 “They rolled her in a ball and just 
 dropped her in there.” He wonders how many other poor women might 
 have been similarly dealt with: “Who knows how many.... [N]ow I don’t 
 know... but we had people out there in the Midwest... and they weren’t 
 looking at cornfields.” Devine regrets not having taken up the invitation 
 to the execution: it was a pity to have been “in it” but not to have been 
 there at the end. 
 
 At the time Henry Devine took up the case for the state on appeal, the 
 facts had long since been established. Those Midwestern cornfields had 
 not yielded any further revelations since the conviction of Martha Beck 
 and Ray Fernandez in August 1949. The appeal process was merely a 
 means of dickering over the details of due process, a due process the end 
 of which was the scheduled execution of the Hearts Killers. 3 That mo¬ 
 ment when Martha Beck eyed the lawyers and told them she wanted no 
 further appeal proceedings on her behalf showed that she, at least, was 
 inured to the prospect of her imminent death. Both Beck and Fernandez 
 had been scheduled for death since their highly irregular extradition from 
 Michigan (where they’d been arrested for the killing of Delphine Down¬ 
 ing 4 and her two-year-old daughter, Rainelle). 5 Mr. Devine recounted the 
 words of the governor of Michigan as he offered up his already infamous 
 wards: “We don’t like these laws down here.” Michigan, unlike New 
 York, had no death penalty. 
 
 Beck and Fernandez had been the center of frantic media activity since 
 their arrest in Grand Rapids. In a spirit of cooperation that benefited 
 everybody but the suspects, the arresting officers in Kent County, Michi¬ 
 gan, posed their wards for photographs, passed on their personal letters 
 and, in one particularly sleazy' incident, stole a photograph of Martha’s 
 two children to give to the press. 6 As the extradition process moved on, 
 stories originally printed in the Grand Rapids press began appearing back 
 East in Newsday, the principal Long Island paper. Before long, the notori¬ 
 ety of the accused killers spread beyond those states in which the arrest 
 and trial occurred. Eventually, the pair would come to be known as 
 
 80 Murder 
 
“America’s Most Hated Murderers,” although they held that title neither 
 exclusively nor permanently. 7 
 
 Indeed, the infamy of Beck and Fernandez ensured them a place in 
 the annals of true crime. The crimes of the Lonely Hearts Killers or Hon¬ 
 eymoon Killers struck a resonant chord in the culture in which they 
 occurred, and that same culture then became the audience for the re- 
 staged (and rewritten) murder events. The two chapters following will 
 track the emergence of the true crime version of the killings and its 
 authoritative portrait of the killers, offering a critique of the ways in 
 which authority — in a tale for which there could be no definitive truth — 
 was constructed by a framing of the meager “facts” by generic narrative 
 structures. My own moment of hopeful expectation as I set out to inter¬ 
 view Hank Devine is eloquent testimony that the author of the tale of 
 murder can become beguiled by the proximity of “fact,” by the possibility 
 that one is about to find out (or tell) “what really happened.” And yet that 
 optimism, that certainty, can be borne out only by reference to other 
 authorizing narrative strategies (such as those deployed by Wertham and 
 Bok) which can “flesh out” the factitious meaning of murder. In the case 
 of the tale of the Hearts Killers, the reauthoring of the tale is not ac¬ 
 complished by a single author but by the multiple voices of legal author¬ 
 ity, the media, and the wider culture which is both source and conduit of 
 the media. In such a circumstance, the search for authority eschews the 
 ahistorical, archetypal, mythological, and metaphorical narrative struc¬ 
 tures of Wertham and Bok in favor of more readily accessible cultural 
 scripts in the pulp fictions of romance and crime. 
 
 The story of the Hearts Killers grew from a morass of conflicting 
 detail —detail which was contained in the confessions leaked by the Kent 
 County detectives and which was later battled over in the testimony of 
 the principals during their forty-four-day trial. Martha Beck, a twenty- 
 nine-year-old nurse from Pensacola, Florida, and Raymond Fernandez, 
 a thirty-four-year-old American of Spanish descent whose occupation 
 on committal for trial was listed as “construction,” 8 were being tried in 
 Nassau County for the murder on 4 January 1949 of Mrs. Janet Fay, a 
 sixty-six-year-old widow to whom Fernandez was then engaged. The 
 couple had been initially arrested in Michigan, where they were being 
 held for the murders of Delphine and Rainelle Downing, whose bodies 
 had been found beneath damp cement in the cellar of Delphine’s Grand 
 
 True Crime Romance I 81 
 
Rapids home. The Michigan murders and a couple of other “suspicious” 
 deaths (Fernandez’s paramours) never resulted in indictments, and the 
 Downing case was officially closed after the New York conviction of Beck 
 and Fernandez for the Fay murder. Crime writers, not unlike the retired 
 prosecutor Henry Devine, would nevertheless continue to allude to the 
 “many other” unsolved murders of single ladies for which Beck and Fer¬ 
 nandez might have been responsible. 9 Once the narrative of murder had 
 been wrested from the restrictive arena of the courts, 10 the murder of 
 Janet Fay became a kind of metaphorical standard for the greater criminal 
 careers of Beck and Fernandez. One body rolled into a ball and buried 
 never seemed quite enough. 
 
 Conflicting accounts of Fay’s murder arose from out of the initial con¬ 
 fessions of the killers, accounts which were later refuted on the stand as 
 being tendered under duress. Even given the contest over those accounts 
 between the defendants themselves, and between prosecution and de¬ 
 fense, the cumulative tendency was to bestow upon Martha Beck the 
 primary agency. She was the one who wielded the hammer — whether as a 
 furious but contingent act 11 or in a blackout induced by the stress of 
 obsession for her lover. 12 This tendency of Martha to bear the weight of 
 the crime (giving a double entendre to the media’s favored name for her, 
 “Fat Martha”) prompted the defense to abandon the insanity plea for Ray 
 Fernandez a third of the way through the trial. His new defense was a bid 
 to reduce the charge to one of accessory' after the fact. 
 
 The defense’s claim of Martha’s insanity was a confused one. Herbert 
 Rosenberg, representing both clients (despite the conflicting strategies), 
 tried to impress upon the jury two possible scenarios: the hammering was 
 committed in a “blackout,” or, had she been conscious, Beck had no 
 control of her actions and was unable to determine that they were wrong. 
 The burden was upon the prosecution to prove her sane, yet their task 
 was simplified by the defense’s apparent confusion of insanity' and “abnor¬ 
 mality.” 13 The prosecutor, Edward Robinson, was quite happy to concede 
 the “abnormality” of the accused. In point of fact, everyone involved in 
 the trial seemed happy to do so —with the notable exception of Beck and 
 Fernandez themselves. 
 
 Before the insanity defense was abandoned for Fernandez, Rosenberg 
 got him to tell the court his life story, that testimony being a portrait of 
 violent times that could not have failed to affect the defendant. In Spain, 
 
 82 Murder 
 
Fernandez had been indentured by Franco’s forces to help administer the 
 execution of Loyalists in his home town. Sometimes those Loyalists were 
 his own friends, and the totality of his experience in the Spanish Civil 
 War had upset his moral sense. Failing to demonstrate the plausibility of 
 this psychological battering, the defense also presented the court with 
 evidence of organic defect: Fernandez had sustained a head injury when a 
 ships hatch, improperly secured during a storm, fell in on him. 14 Unfor¬ 
 tunately, when the insanity plea was abandoned the prosecution (ignoring 
 the evidence of brain injury) turned the story of Fernandez’s war experi¬ 
 ences against him. He had not been driven insane (in the legal definition) 
 but had merely lost all decent human feeling. 15 
 
 Both defendants were led through their life stories by Rosenberg. The 
 biographical testimony alone takes up hundreds of pages. Both stories 
 were presented in order to establish the human presence of the defendants, 
 for, after all, first-degree murder carried with it a mandatory death sen¬ 
 tence. Secondly, those stories were meant to picture the helplessness of 
 the defendants before the forces inside them which had propelled them 
 through a chaos of crime toward murder. Picking up on a casual phrase of 
 one of the defense psychiatrists, Rosenberg described Martha Beck as “a 
 slip of the Potter’s hand.” By the end of the trial, Martha had ended up in 
 exclusive possession, figuratively speaking, of the hammer. Possessing the 
 murder, she also became the sole barometer of that “abnormality” which 
 the defense so vainly tried to code as insanity. Beck’s pathology — the 
 abnormality so frequently alluded to — was not criminal, but moral: 
 
 [T]here wasn’t one criminal tendency shown in her background until she got 
 involved here. But look at her entire background, her dealings with the defendant 
 Fernandez, her love for him, her attending these marriages [to other women, his 
 “marks”], playing strip poker, acting as a witness [to one of Fernandez’s marriages 
 to a rival]. Go through that entire background and can you honesdy come to the 
 conclusion that she was a normal person? 16 
 
 Yet what was the content of that “abnormality”? At the time of the 
 trial, the nature of Fernandez’s and, particularly, Beck’s abnormality was 
 deemed so offensive by the news media that they neglected to print it. As 
 late as 1961 a respected English writer of true crime, Colin Wilson, 
 observed that “the details of [the] sexual relationship that emerged (both 
 were complete degenerates) were so indecent that they were never pub- 
 
 True Crime Romance I 83 
 
lished.” 17 The media did frequendy allude to the “sordid” histories of the 
 defendants in place of those more immediate facts about the sexual rela¬ 
 tionship that only the court would hear (the press gallery being, in this 
 instance, silent witness). 
 
 The discussion of abnormality forms one of the few continuous threads 
 of the trial. That the murder happened was not disputed, but how and 
 why it happened were topics of hot dispute. 18 In this particular case, as 
 well as in the tale of murder more generally, a definitive account con¬ 
 tinues to be unknowable. Given the lack of a definitive version of the Fay 
 murder, authority in the narrative had to come from another source. The 
 elasticity of the account of murder could be capitalized upon only by the 
 insertion into the narrative of the vital subtext of the murderers’ abnor¬ 
 mality. In all accounts of the Lonely Hearts Killers, including the trial, it 
 is this shift of emphasis that constructs the tale of murder. 
 
 From the time of the arrest till just before the execution there appeared 
 at least eight different accounts of the night of the murder (see Appendix). 
 Six of these were tendered (allegedly) by the suspects, the remaining two 
 were the composite versions offered by prosecution and defense. Al¬ 
 though the account of the murder itself is not to be confused with the tale 
 of murder as a ‘whole , 19 as the central axis of the tale it holds a particular 
 fascination. In each version it is possible to see the point of entry for the 
 real story, for that supposition which is the moment of truth: the revela¬ 
 tion of the character of the murderer. 
 
 At the conclusion of her statement to Dr. Richard Hoffmann (see Ap¬ 
 pendix), Martha wrote that she had “never killed anyone in [her] life.” 20 
 The depositions of the Kent County authorities do not agree. In all 
 versions of the killings of Delphine 21 and Rainelle Downing, it is Martha 
 who murders the child, drowning her in a laundry' tub. 22 The only other 
 documented death with which the pair was linked is that of Myrtle 
 Young, whom Fernandez married and then sent home, heavily drugged, 
 on a Greyhound bus. When Myrtle Young arrived at her destination, she 
 was dead — although, according to the coroner, the cause of her death was 
 natural and by no means the necessary result of the sleeping pills she’d 
 been given. There was also the question of the suspicious death of a lady 
 in Fernandez’s company (prior to his meeting Martha Beck) while the two 
 were traveling in Spain. The prosecution in the Fay trial would allude to 
 an outstanding warrant for Fernandez’s arrest there, and would hint at his 
 
 84 Murder 
 
administering an overdose of digitalis. These accusations were not sub¬ 
 stantiated. 23 As Jane Thompson died before Ray met Martha Beck, it is 
 inappropriate to list her as one of the possible victims of the Lonely 
 Hearts Killers. Only the deaths of Janet Fay and Delphine and Rainelle 
 Downing can be reliably connected to Beck and Fernandez. 
 
 Why and how did three murders earn Beck and Fernandez the tide of 
 “America’s Most Hated Murderers”? And why did the spurious tally of 
 twenty killings continue to be held to their account? 24 Clues to the con¬ 
 struction of the composite, the “authoritative” tale, can be found in the 
 various versions of the Fay murder. Martha’s final attempt to fix the blame 
 for the murder onto Fernandez could only have been ineffective. It came 
 too late to challenge the authoritative account. Indeed, it was irrelevant to 
 the murder narrative that Martha Beck may not have actually killed Mrs. 
 Fay. Martha’s late but insistent denial of culpability is co-opted by an 
 established narrative that reads Martha’s fear of Raymond Fernandez as 
 merely another manifestation of her romantic obsession. The mutuality 
 implicit in the fatal contract of the folk a deux will not allow Martha her 
 dissent. The couple were portrayed as murderous lovers, as textbook 
 examples of the phenomenon of folk a deux. The infamy of “America’s 
 Most Hated Murderers” can therefore be explained by the way in which 
 their tale was received and understood by contemporaries. The story of 
 the Hearts Killers came to be read, both by its initial mediators and by 
 their public, through the generic lens of the romance. 
 
 An Unlikely Heroine in a Deviant Genre 
 
 Just before his death, Ray Fernandez responded angrily to those who’d so 
 assiduously followed the tale of his and Martha’s ill-fated union. “What,” 
 he demanded in a letter published by the Journal American (8 March 
 1951) “do the public know about love?” 
 
 What the public knew about love was, in fact, a great deal. Like crime, 
 love was something that happened to people, not just something read 
 about in the papers. The American public set great store by personal 
 experience, but it was a discourse of romance that formed the conditions 
 of existence for that experience. The public came to know love, like 
 crime, through its mediators. One saw crime in comic books (set in city- 
 
 True Crime Romance I 85 
 
scapes where villainy had no apparent social context); one could read 
 about it in a variety of written forms of the crime genre, from the genteel 
 to the hard-boiled, as well as in the daily press and in the columns of Time 
 and the photo-essays of Life; and one could see crime represented in 
 the crime movie, the women’s film and —if one happened to be of the 
 inclination — in French cinema paying homage to American film noir (one 
 could also see crime in the Western, where it was framed by a more 
 general lawlessness that, a little like the world of the superhero comic, 
 was a background against which “good” and “bad” stood out in clear 
 relief). People in rural America looked toward the cities as the place 
 where crime “belonged,” and, as often as not, those in the city looked, in 
 much the same way, to those neighborhoods in which they or their kind 
 (their race, their class, their ethnic group) did not live. Crime was some¬ 
 thing one occasionally saw (or turned away from) and, more often, gos¬ 
 siped about. And, finally, there were those whose interest and experience 
 in what passed for crime was —in one way or another —thorough and 
 immediate. Personal experience, public discourse, and commonsensical 
 knowledge collapse into one another. A recent work analyzing the vital 
 juncture of urban discourse and the crime genre has noted that the di¬ 
 verse ways in which the city was representationally “mapped” rendered 
 
 such oppositions as reality/fiction and authentic/fake inapplicable. The “real” 
 city merges with what Robert Warshow has famously called the dangerous, sad 
 city of the imagination. “History,” distinct from fiction but still a species of 
 narrative, increasingly appears as one text among many. 25 
 
 This “dangerous, sad city of the imagination” is a city of crime. 
 
 Of course, there is not one, but many, generic “species of narrative” (to 
 borrow Ralph Willett’s phrase) from out of which that grander narrative 
 species “history” is constructed. Take the daily news, for instance. Al¬ 
 though the presentation of news in the contemporary 7 newspapers was 
 structured by genre and its writers were supposed specialists in their areas 
 (the crime writer, the fashion writer, the gossip columnist), the reader 
 could expect to read more than one section of a paper to take in the news. 
 The more important an item of news, the more likely 7 it was to draw in 
 elements of other genres, and thus to draw a greater audience. So it was 
 that Dorothy Kilgallen, normally the film and theatre columnist for the 
 
 86 Murder 
 
New York Journal American , was sent off to cover the Hearts Killers when 
 the trial first opened. 
 
 The two best-selling pulp genres of the late 1940s and early 1950s were, 
 as today, romance and detective fiction. The immense popularity of the 
 “women’s him” (a genre identified as the blending of film noir and the 
 romance) amply demonstrates the interdependence of these genres. Cer¬ 
 tainly their audiences were not mutually exclusive, and it was in the adver¬ 
 tising columns of True Detective Magazine that Janet Fay found an ad for 
 Mother Dinene’s Lonely Hearts Club, her membership in which would 
 prove fatal. 26 In the case of the Lonely Hearts Killers these two powerful 
 pulp genres collided, greatly increasing the reach of the narrative of mur¬ 
 der. 27 For a public well primed in both the love story and the tale of mur¬ 
 der, the reported testimony of People v. Fernandez was indeed a rare dish. 
 
 Reports of the trial followed the various accounts of the murder, while 
 also dwelling on the biographical detail. The insanity defense, at first 
 deployed for both defendants, soon focused on Martha. The three ver¬ 
 sions of the murder from her mouth (the two Michigan statements and 
 her testimony on the stand) established her primary position in the mur¬ 
 der narrative, while also defining the “abnormality” of the defendants’ 
 relationship. 28 
 
 During Martha Beck’s four days of testimony, the public vied for a place 
 in the courtroom. The day on which she ran to Fernandez and kissed him 
 repeatedly before being drawn away by the matrons, the judge had to 
 quell a “riotous demonstration . . . when 150 persons, mosdy middle- 
 aged women, tried to rush the courtroom.” This same capacity audience 
 of women also heard Mrs. Beck tell her attorney, “I loved, do love and will 
 always love” Ray Fernandez. 29 Covering the trial’s opening, Dorothy 
 Kilgallen quickly identified Martha as the significant figure in the tale: 
 “she so big and extroverted, he so small and withdrawn.” Mrs. Beck was 
 “outwardly the more colorful of the weird and wretched team.” Kilgallen 
 wondered at Martha’s ability to “remain nerveless through gaudy descrip¬ 
 tions of the crime and shocking references to her own part in it.” The 
 columnist soon found the physical sign of that unworldliness: 
 
 [I]t is her hands that really tell the story of her calm. They lie, one in her lap, one 
 on the table in front of her, absolutely relaxed, palms upturned, the fingers curled 
 
 True Crime Romance I 87 
 
a little like a child’s in repose.... If these are the hands that wielded the ball-pein 
 hammer . .. then someone should take a picture of them for the annals of crime 
 and criminals. They look like hands that would rock a cradle, not hands that 
 would wield a lethal weapon. 30 
 
 A few years later, journalists would rave about the small hands of Barbara 
 Graham, not believing her ability to pistol-whip Mabel Monaghan to 
 death. 31 Unlike the skepticism that the petite frame and good looks 
 of Graham evinced in her supporters, “Fat Martha” provided ample dis¬ 
 cursive space upon which to project the murder. Her pleas to the press 
 to accurately report her weight (185 lbs.) were ignored, and Kilgallen 
 scoffed at this minor concern of the murderer at being “called a fatty.” 
 Yet Martha’s weight was not an unimportant fact at the trial, where it 
 was treated as the physical manifestation of her mental abnormality by 
 the defense and, by the media, as her defining characteristic. Correspon¬ 
 dents wrote of her as that “fat, grinning woman of incredible calm.” 32 
 Descriptions of her appearance while testifying tended to make the 
 clothes disappear into her body, a body that overwhelmed any attempt at 
 adornment: 
 
 Mrs. Beck was . . . heavy with make-up. Her cheeks were rouged and her lips 
 appeared pendulous under thick layers of lipstick. Mrs. Beck wore a two-strand 
 necklace, almost concealed under the folds of her chin. 33 
 
 This description was the news media’s preface to Martha’s testimony that 
 she was sexually accosted by her brother at age thirteen, pestered by a 
 lascivious brother-in-law and, for successive years, had to fend off men at 
 home and at w'ork. 34 The record of these sexual tribulations was offered 
 up by the defense not to show' reason to mitigate harsh judgment of the 
 defendant 35 —who had herself suffered in life —but as a principal part of 
 the evidence of her insanity. The press headlined their report “Sordid 
 Childhood Told By Martha” and wrote that her mother’s refusal to let her 
 date boys “led, according to the witness,” to Martha’s “incestuous rela¬ 
 tions with her brother, Dudley.” 36 From the very outset, the frame pre¬ 
 senting Martha’s story of systematic abuse is skewed. The defense argued 
 that moral depredations left her mentally unbalanced, yet the overall 
 impression given in their argument is one of organic defect. 37 Martha 
 produced, and even sought out, her own degradation. The media tended 
 
 88 Murder 
 
to follow that line of reasoning, while the prosecution, intent on demol¬ 
 ishing the insanity defense, simply turned the stories of Martha’s victim¬ 
 ization into evidence of bad character. Martha’s testimony that she had 
 lost one of her jobs when she “slapped hell out of” the doctor who made a 
 pass at her became ammunition for the prosecution. Assistant District 
 Attorney Edward Robinson told the jury: 
 
 Is she the poor little innocent girl that they would have her painted here?... Is she 
 the one here who wants to take her life every time somebody crosses her? One 
 who has been bounced around when she was a youngster, deprived of everything 
 in life, downtrodden by her mother? 
 
 . . . That character, that woman who tells you how she slapped hell out of a 
 doctor —everybody was making a pass at her by the way —she was able to take 
 care of herself; looks pretty healthy as she sits there now. 38 
 
 As the prosecutor indicated the defendant, he was gesturing at “Fat Mar¬ 
 tha”: all of her purported “200 pounds,” her murderer’s hands, her huge, 
 painted, devouring mouth. The story of her life could not be read outside 
 the vessel that contained it. 
 
 Reporting the second day of Martha’s testimony, then, the press wrote 
 of her “200 pounds shaking with sobs.” 39 Martha’s “frustrated romances 
 and sexual abnormalities” were detailed to a press that alluded only 
 vaguely to the detail of those “abnormalities.” The, Journal American told 
 its readers how Martha had been advised by her doctor to “indulge in 
 ‘various other forms of intimacy’ ” (instead of intercourse) with Fernan¬ 
 dez, and that same doctor had opined that her “earlier experiences” with 
 her brother were the root cause of all her troubles. The testimony that 
 the press declined to relate —that would by successive writers be de¬ 
 scribed as “sensational” and “degenerate” —was of Dr. Fuzon’s advice to 
 Martha Beck that she ask for oral sex from Fernandez. Martha claimed 
 never to have experienced an orgasm, and Luzon suggested that cun- 
 nilingus might be the means to attain the satisfaction that Fernandez was 
 apparently so anxious to provide: 40 
 
 [The doctor] told me that... those measures would bring forth satisfaction when 
 the normal average intercourse would not, and he told me not to look upon those 
 as being ugly or vulgar; that when two people loved each other, that no matter 
 what they did, it was not to be considered abnormal. 41 
 
 True Crime Romance I 89 
 
Doctor Luzon also suggested to Martha that she enter therapy to try to 
 heal some of the damage caused by abuse. But, against Dr. Luzon’s re¬ 
 peated admonitions, both the court and the public did regard that sexual 
 practice — even unnamed —as “abnormal,” as “ugly” and “vulgar.” The 
 reason for Martha’s inability to achieve orgasm would then get lost, once 
 again, in the translation of the psychic into the physical: trauma into 
 misanthropy. 42 
 
 On the second day of testifying, Martha began to detail for the court, 
 the press, and the assembled spectators her various suicide attempts. One 
 of these occurred when she witnessed Fernandez making love to one of 
 the women whom he was trying to bilk of her fortune. The Journal 
 American wrote that Mrs. Beck’s jealousy impelled her to throw herself in 
 the Connecticut River, “only to be rescued by Fernandez.” 43 They clearly 
 implied that such melodrama was quite ridiculous. Yet, one month ear¬ 
 lier, a competitor in the Journal American ’s “How I Got my Man” contest 
 told how she had used the “often ridiculed method of a fake drowning to 
 attract the man of [her] dreams.” The correspondent wrote with great 
 satisfaction that she “swam a little way from the shore and then began 
 to clamor and shout. Sure enough Johnny came rushing out.” 44 The con¬ 
 test, wrote one of its judges, “proved what we have long suspected. . . . 
 [W]omen, when they want something, know how to use all the clever 
 tricks in the book.” 45 Martha’s “tricks,” although not unusual (excepting 
 that they had apparently led to murder), were wholly disapproved of. 
 What might have been an ordinary litany of self-sacrifice in the pursuit of 
 romance became, in retrospect, a sign of pathology. Martha’s “madness” 
 and murderousness overspilled her actual 185 pounds. The media (who 
 were sometimes wrong on her weight by as much as 100 pounds) were 
 unable to detach the romantic script from the body upon which culture 
 dictated it was written. So written, the romantic script folded in upon 
 itself: part romance, part horror story. 
 
 The generic requirements of the romance have changed slighdy 
 over time. Feminist rereadings of the genre have reclaimed its erotic 
 agency for women, but that is an agency which can still be seen as self- 
 defeating. 46 The position of the female desiring subject vis-a-vis the male 
 object is a critical subject for analysis, but one that is complicated when 
 the failed heroine of the romance becomes a murderer; when the ro¬ 
 mance itself becomes a tale of murder. The subject positioning of the 
 
 90 Murder 
 
romantic heroine is important here to the extent that Fernandez’s role in 
 the tale of murder was not, and never could have been, the central role. 
 The traditional romance demands that the romantic subject be (or be 
 positioned as) a woman. The penalties of that requirement for Martha 
 Beck were profound indeed. 
 
 Put crudely, the generic demands of the pulp romance are simple. The 
 desiring subject should be skilled in one of the ministering occupations: 
 teacher, nurse, governess. These worldly skills are only on loan — they 
 can be redeemed for the domestic role of mother and wife at any time. 
 Working is a way of marking time in the romance. The work that is done 
 by the heroine is mere scene-setting; it does not actually form any part 
 of the action. In the romance the object of desire is either downright 
 threatening or completely disinterested. Once his bad behavior has been 
 curbed or his attention won, the compact of romance ends with mar¬ 
 riage-offering a lifetime of love and sexual satisfaction in a monog¬ 
 amous relationship. To take on that life, which is a kind of rebirth, the 
 heroine gives up paid work: her true life’s work revealed as her ability to 
 transform, through loving, the love object. In the romance everything is 
 veneer. Surfaces are intricately described: scenic locations, food, clothes. 
 The heart of the romance is its costume: ensemble and accessory. 
 
 In many ways the tale of murder told at the trial and through the 
 newspapers conforms to these generic requirements. The “fear of love 
 unfulfilled” that typifies the mechanism of suspense in the romance needs 
 only the slightest change of emphasis to bring with it “the suspense of an 
 unanswered question” more typical of the crime story. 47 The difference 
 between narrators’ accounts is generally only one of emphasis, of direc¬ 
 tion. The tale told by the press centers on Martha; she is its subject. 
 Various elements gain priority in the telling, and others are diminished, 
 precisely because of the demands of the genre. Martha is a registered 
 nurse, and a good one: she works for a while as superintendent of a home 
 for crippled children. She has one child illegitimately and another in a 
 failed marriage. She has a number of failed relationships, and then Ray¬ 
 mond Fernandez comes along. He is better to her, more considerate than 
 any man has ever been. She goes to live with him and is then forced to 
 make a choice between keeping him and keeping her children, as his life¬ 
 style and living arrangements forbid such obligations. She chooses Fer¬ 
 nandez over the children, whom she hands over into care. Both Fer- 
 
 True Crime Romance I 91 
 
nandez and Martha continue to work at their legitimate occupations (he 
 as laborer, she as nurse), 48 while Raymond pursues his money-spinning 
 “hobby” of entering into romantic liaisons with spinsters. In order to fit 
 in with Fernandez’s career, and to be near him, Martha poses as his sister, 
 rather than the lover she is. Yet Martha is jealous and suspicious of ul¬ 
 terior motives in his liaisons, and she attempts suicide on several occa¬ 
 sions, feeling herself to be a failure. She can envision no other alternative 
 to Raymond’s love. The murders of both Janet Fay and Delphine Down¬ 
 ing are ostensibly prompted by jealousy. On the stand, Martha takes most 
 of the blame for the murders, protecting her lover. Once convicted, she 
 continues to write love letters to him and to publicly profess her love. As 
 the execution date approaches, Martha instructs her attorneys to stop 
 pursuing her case for clemency. She wants to die, but she is not executed 
 until her lover is already dead, having preceded her to the chair. 49 
 
 Obviously this summary is not set in the traditional romance mold, but 
 the way in which it was played with by its narrators (including the defen¬ 
 dants themselves) yields the essence of the tale of murder as romance. In 
 telling her life story, Martha revealed the significance to her of the ro¬ 
 mance genre. She told the court about her reading habits: 
 
 [W]hen I would read a novel that was very interesting, or that the heroine was 
 going through a very romantic period, I would dream and plan and wonder how it 
 would be if that was in real life and it had happened to me rather than just being 
 fiction.... [W]hen I would go to bed at night, rather than being able to relax and 
 go to sleep, I would continue thinking back over how happy the different women 
 in the stories were, and I used to wonder if I would ever be able to have such 
 happiness. 
 
 Q. And were you dreaming constandy of being in love? 
 
 A. I would say that I was, yes. 
 
 Q. And being loved by someone? 
 
 A. That is true. 50 
 
 This part of her testimony was condensed by the Journal American into 
 one paragraph: 
 
 I read Shakespeare, Dumas, Tennyson, Browning and others, and had day dreams 
 about heroes and heroines I read about. I wondered if I would ever be able to fall 
 in love. I dreamed of a family life that was different from the life I had at home. I 
 
 92 Murder 
 
was attracted by a young man who frequented the library in the summer of 1938.1 
 carried his picture always in my mind. 51 
 
 The difference between the transcript and the media versions of Martha’s 
 romantic musings is substantial. While the former suggests a very clear 
 sense of the difference between real life and fiction, the media version 
 turns Martha Beck into an inveterate “dreamer,” and an obsessive one at 
 that. The news media’s “romance” then, is a situation without context: 
 fiction’s defiance of life. Not a story with a subject (Martha Beck) but a 
 symptom. In her own testimony, on the other hand, the distance between 
 romantic fantasy and real life is measured by the latter’s failures: 
 
 Even though I would continue to read the novels and would wonder how it would 
 be to be in love or loved, the affair that I had with my brother would always push 
 itself to the front part of my mind. 52 
 
 Those failures are themselves shaped by the language of romance. Mar¬ 
 tha speaks of the “affair” with her brother, bestowing a mutuality on 
 the event that it patently lacked. The media had achieved the same effect 
 with their earlier decree on the cause of the abuse: Mrs. Seabrook’s re¬ 
 fusal to let Martha see boys “led” to her “incestuous relations” with her 
 brother. 53 
 
 Martha established herself not as romantic heroine, but as witness and 
 spectator as she marks out the space of the subject. Vicarious and specu¬ 
 lar, the romance offers to its reader the chance to be both the subject of 
 the tale and its audience. Only as she began to tell her own story would 
 Martha Beck become the romantic subject, doing so in a script not en¬ 
 tirely her own. 
 
 Martha tells a love story, but the court and the reporters are convened 
 to hear the tale of murder. The defense tries to stress the continuity of the 
 defendant’s work record, noting in particular the responsible positions 
 held —more than adequately —by Martha. Full-time work is incompat¬ 
 ible with the picture of the pair as con artists, so the many laboring jobs 
 taken up by Fernandez vanish from the retelling of the story. 54 Martha’s 
 work goes by the way too, positions sacrificed through inattention and for 
 the greater cause of her love. 55 In fact, she continues to work intermit¬ 
 tently, but her work is no longer a part of her. The sociability that is the 
 subtext of work (and, in the case of nursing, its very ethics) is found 
 
 True Crime Romance I 93 
 
lacking in Martha. Imagine the reaction to her testimony that she had 
 originally wanted to become a mortician: 
 
 [T]here were only two funeral homes in the little town where I was born and 
 raised and all of the attendants were men. During that time, two very close friends 
 of mine had died and at the time when I went to the funeral home to see them they 
 were surrounded by men and I couldn’t understand the fact that even though a 
 person were dead why a woman would have to be taken care of by a man, and I felt 
 that I . . . might be able to give a little ease to the loved ones by knowing that a 
 woman was taking care of their female loved ones. S6 
 
 In the context of the murder trial, her salvo at the male-dominated 
 death professions seemed evidence of a morbid disposition. The defense 
 brought this out, like much of Martha’s life story, purely to the end of 
 proving her “insanity.” Work could not exist for Martha. She was denied 
 the dignity of a vocation, both because she was a woman and because she 
 was this particular woman. Her career as a nurse, second choice to a 
 career in embalming, is merely a means for Martha to exercise her desire 
 for power, her warped nurturing instinct. The issue, then, is not work, 
 but the disposition of the worker. The story of Martha’s ambition to be a 
 mortician would, predictably, become an important one in the true crime 
 chronicle. 
 
 The conceptualization of work in the tale of murder as romance is 
 significant. Two nightmare romances converge here: Martha’s love story 
 and the story of predation of the Hearts Killers. Fernandez’s real work is 
 his seduction of moneyed spinsters; his ability to select and woo the best 
 prospects on the lists mailed to him by Lonely Hearts clubs. Ray is “the 
 bald-headed, wig-wearing Lothario who lured women to destruction.” 57 
 For Ray, the toupee (and his baldness) become as telling a sign of pathol¬ 
 ogy as xMartha’s weight. His masculinity is a pose, his seductive skills false 
 promise. The toupee is a necessary tool of his trade; it hides his vul¬ 
 nerability (age, loss of virility). The hairpiece becomes a staple of the 
 media descriptions and, later, of the true crime chronicle of the killers. 58 
 In point of fact, the trial record reveals that Fernandez purchased the 
 toupee not long before their arrest and wore it only twice. 59 Ray’s “work” 
 demands the toupee, not the tools of the builder’s trade; so, the toupee 
 stays. 
 
 Martha’s work becomes the w r ork of the subject of romance gone 
 
 94 Murder 
 
wrong: she works not to win her man (and make him over), but just to 
 keep him. Fernandez, for Beck, was “one hundred per cent better than 
 any other man.” 60 Never mind that she worked as a nurse at St. Luke’s and 
 Holy Cross in Chicago while they were there, her real vocation was 
 keeping Ray. Keeping Ray entailed, for the press and the accounts to 
 come, a number of sacrifices. After leaving her job and her home state, 
 Martha came to New York to be with Ray, a move that entailed another 
 dispossession: “she abandoned her two children at a Salvation Army mis¬ 
 sion to become the mistress of Raymond Fernandez.” 61 As the romantic 
 subject, Martha was obliged to choose Ray over the children, since their 
 presence disrupted the story of love. 62 The children disappear from the 
 romance, only to reappear in the tale of murder. The defense and the 
 prosecution both need the children — or, rather, that the children be lost. 
 In its final and desperate straits, the defense tried to solicit from one of 
 the state’s psychiatrists an admission that a “woman who gave up her 
 children” might be a psychopathic personality. 63 Harkening back to Mar¬ 
 tha’s own explanation that she was “tom between two loves,” the prosecu¬ 
 tion spoke sarcastically of “this awful, terrible decision [where] she had to 
 choose between love for her two children and love for the guy she was 
 going to live with, although she was frigid.” 64 Here, then, is the romance 
 as horror story; the order of the romance is inverted. The children are an 
 end, and a promise: arriving too early in the plot, they represent its 
 undoing. Likewise, the desire of the woman should be present but re¬ 
 strained, a foil to the aggressive desire of the male and the force that 
 compels her to make him love. Martha’s “frigidity” is that desire turned 
 inside out: a black hole into which masculine desire is drawn. Her “frigid¬ 
 ity” consumes the maternal instinct. 
 
 On the third day ofMartha’s testifying, th e Journal American wrote that 
 she had “added a suicide complex” to the “story of frustrated romances 
 and sexual abnormalities.” 65 Laboriously, Martha sought to put into con¬ 
 text the “at least seven” suicide attempts that she could recall. Not all of 
 these occurred while she was with Fernandez, but most did. The prosecu¬ 
 tion attacked this testimony with a relentless cynicism. How could a 
 woman, so set on dying, fail so ridiculously in her attempts? 66 Martha’s 
 desire to die, like her sexual desire, is not great enough to fill the huge 
 vessel of her body. “Fat, frigid” Martha is a well into which desire and 
 death fall. The tide of affect turns inside Martha’s great body: she is 
 
 True Crime Romance I 95 
 
implicated in the “sex mania” of her lover, and in the murder of two of his 
 conquests. As the romantic subject in the tale of murder (the two become 
 one) Martha becomes the antithesis of the romantic affect, while retain¬ 
 ing the power of the subject. 
 
 As the love object/murderer, Raymond is as much afflicted by lack as 
 Martha is by excess. His are the skills of the seducer, not the husband. 67 
 Martha’s “frigidity” is the occasion for refinement of these most illegiti¬ 
 mate skills. Fernandez begins to indulge in “abnormal vices”: the unpro¬ 
 ductive sexual practice of oral sex. Both partners in this sexual act are 
 “abnormal,” but Martha as instigator and primary beneficiary of its plea¬ 
 sures is somehow worse. Martha experiences her first orgasm during oral 
 sex, yet the prosecution still refers to her “frigidity,” defining the il¬ 
 legitimacy of this particular pleasure. Even her orgasm is wrong. When 
 Martha had “the reaction, she would get upset.” Fernandez added that 
 “after the abnormal sexual, as you say, well, she would be very quiet. It 
 may last maybe for an hour; maybe sometimes 20 minutes.” 68 This fugue 
 state was referred to a number of times throughout the trial as evidence of 
 the peculiarity of Martha’s desire. A modern reader might think instead of 
 the flashbacks suffered by survivors of sexual abuse, the flip side of sexual 
 pleasure for many women. 
 
 Both defendants were closely questioned regarding their sexual life 
 together. The difference in the nature of their responses is marked. Fer¬ 
 nandez sometimes showed a sense of decorum, taking on the shame of¬ 
 fered by his own lawyer’s description of his “abnormality.” 69 Martha, for 
 her part, refused to be shamed, trying to retain the privacy and integrity 
 of the relationship: 
 
 Mr. Rosenberg, the love-making ... that you have described as being abnormal, is 
 something that took place between Mr. Fernandez and I, because we loved each 
 other, and I consider that something practically sacred.... For the love that I had 
 for Mr. Fernandez, nothing we did was abnormal. 70 
 
 Although the papers declined to write about the details of the sex¬ 
 ual relationship, they were not slow to pick up on Martha’s apparent 
 “shamelessness”: 
 
 The testimony was so lurid that large portions of it were unprintable and the 
 courthouse was jammed daily with spectators fighting for admission. Despite the 
 
 96 Murder 
 
abnormal background of their relations, Mrs. Beck said her love for Fernandez 
 was so profound she would have stopped breathing if he told her to. 71 
 
 Silenced by the controversial nature of the sexual testimony, the papers 
 fall back upon the tale of Martha’s obsessive love. The news media’s 
 decorum about the sexual detail of the case did not necessarily mean that 
 the public was ignorant of that content. It was much remarked upon 
 throughout the trial that spectators “fought for admission” daily, and 
 the public galleries were overcrowded. This audience of “middle-aged 
 housewives” 72 is unlikely to have been a silent one, and the judge’s admo¬ 
 nition at the close of every session that those present should not “form or 
 express an opinion concerning the case or any aspect of it” was directed 
 only to the jurors. 
 
 The significance of that quarreling entourage of women is not to be 
 underestimated. Even if they were the same 150 women at every session, 
 the contribution to the case of the spectators’ view — their information 
 fragmentary, and probably poorly digested — is considerable. The media 
 are not, after all, the only vehicle for news and information. Gossip and 
 speculation form the very life of the tale of murder. When the disseminat¬ 
 ing body of that story has any degree of social homogeneity, the narrative 
 will have an enhanced authority, speaking (in all its parts) to the familiar, 
 known, everyday world out of which murder arises. 
 
 Those housewives who watched the tale of murder unfold were not an 
 extraordinary audience. Jurists and crime writers alike have frequently 
 reproved that “idle class of women” who delight in murder trials. 73 Many 
 women, working or with other obligations, would have had no time to 
 spend in overheated courtrooms with poor acoustics, straining to hear 
 the generally banal details of crime. In the late 1940s, though, women 
 were being once again pushed out of the work force. The career of 
 “housewife” was becoming more of an honorary position and less of a 
 vocation, thanks to the service of her inanimate helpmates: vacuum 
 cleaners, dishwashers, clothes dryers, smaller and more efficient stoves, 
 washing machines, and refrigerators. The materials of housewifely lei¬ 
 sure were many. She was the primary consumer of that quintessential 
 literature of domestic isolation, the romance. From the magazines on the 
 coffee table the word “True” proclaims itself any number of times: True 
 Romance side by side with True Crime Detective. The middle-class house- 
 
 True Crime Romance I 97 
 
wife might be tempted to test that “truth,” to lift it out of the pages of the 
 magazine. A short walk to the county courthouse was sufficient for this 
 experiment, and yet the witness fronting up to the “reality” of a murder 
 trial would come equipped to read that often boring text, with litde or no 
 consistent narrative line, as the more rollicking “truth” of the tabloid or 
 the pulp magazine: true crime, true romance. 
 
 Martha told her love story to a hostile court, and told it in such a way (at 
 the behest of her lawyers) that it became —to everyone but herself—the 
 romance as horror story. Martha, for all who watched, could never have 
 appeared to be the ideal romantic subject. “Fat, dowdy Martha” 74 was a 
 parodic figure: just enough of the discourse of romance survived in the 
 tale of murder to thoroughly condemn her as a woman. Martha herself at 
 one point aptly asked whether she was being “tried for murder, or because 
 I’m fat.” 75 She alone was faithful to the tale of romance, and her rendition 
 fell in with the gendering strategy of the discourse of murder. In her final 
 letter to the media, written just hours before she entered the execution 
 chamber, Martha wrote: 
 
 What does it matter who is to blame? My story is a love story, but only those 
 tortured with love can understand what I mean. I was pictured as a fat unfeeling 
 woman. True, I am fat, that I cannot deny, but if that is a crime, how many of my 
 sex are guilty? I am not unfeeling, stupid, or moronic. The prison and the death 
 house have only strengthened my feeling for Raymond, and in the history of the 
 world how many crimes have been attributed to love? 76 
 
 This final plea from Martha to read her story as a “love story” should be 
 placed in its proper context. I have argued above that the whole mecha¬ 
 nism of the trial and the surrounding media controversy worked to pro¬ 
 duce a tale of murder in the distorted generic script of the romance. But 
 the story 7 , so to speak, did not end at the conviction of the defendants, on 
 18 August 1949, for first-degree murder. Throughout their incarceration 
 in the death cells at Sing Sing, Martha and Ray became the objects of even 
 greater scrutiny by news media no longer restricted in their text by the 
 fact-finding mission of a criminal trial. The chronicle of Martha’s and 
 Ray’s on-again, ofif-again prison romance became the focus of this new leg 
 in the journey of “fat Martha” and “skinny Raymond” to the chair. The 
 Journal American printed their love letters to one another, finding more 
 
 98 Murder 
 
interest in those epistles than in news of the progress of the couple’s 
 appeals through the court hierarchy. 
 
 The women who had been the trial’s most faithful attendants main¬ 
 tained their interested position as spectators. Some tried to get a more 
 active involvement. The execution, described as though it were a popular 
 new venue, seemed to be a natural step up from the public galleries of the 
 courtroom: 
 
 Prison officials announced that this will be the biggest “execution night” in point 
 of attendance since that of Mrs. Mary Creighton, Long Island “Borgia” who went 
 to her death in 1937. 
 
 During recent weeks hundreds of requests for invitations have poured in, many 
 from women, some of whom bluntly stated they’d like to pull the switch them¬ 
 selves on Martha. Women are traditionally barred from executions. 77 
 
 This passage recalls the prurience of the defense during the trial when it 
 proffered Martha’s ambition to be a mortician as evidence of her “abnor¬ 
 mality.” Women die, but their corpses should be handled only by men. 
 The state is not above executing women, but is too decorous to allow them 
 to be witnesses to the event. What is particularly notable in this passage is 
 not just the overwhelming presence of women, but the absence of one 
 particular man: Ray Fernandez. The women soliciting invitations aren’t 
 offering to pull the switch on him. Martha is in every respect the focal 
 point of censure in the tale of murder as romance: she is the failed roman¬ 
 tic subject, a failure that reflects as poorly upon her sex as does her 
 conviction for murder. Both failings are inextricably entwined. 
 
 “Death House Romance” 
 
 Throughout the Sing Sing romance, Ray was censured (along with Mar¬ 
 tha) for his part in the parody of romance in which they alternately cooed 
 and cursed at one another. Ray’s disadvantages as the love object had been 
 established early on in the trial, when his claim to being merely an ac¬ 
 cessory to murder gave logistical support to the media’s portrait of him as 
 weak and vacillating. Fernandez never quite measured up as a Lothario — 
 after all, to the media he was that “ bald-headed Lothario.” The Lothario, 
 
 True Crime Romance I 99 
 
even as criminal, had a heroic appeal that Fernandez patendy lacked. 
 Throughout the trial of the Hearts Killers, the Journal American was 
 busily serializing the story of Sigmund Engel, a late-middle-aged “gen- 
 deman” who swindled women of their fortunes through various methods 
 of romantic inducement, including the promise of marriage. Engel re¬ 
 marked upon the “curious fact” that “no woman I courted ever blamed 
 me for a thing — until I stopped courting her. None was impelled to ‘blow 
 the whisde on me’ through any motive save jealousy.” 78 Engel had never 
 murdered any of the women he “courted.” Yet what saved his reputation 
 was not so much his restraint in that regard as it was his ability to retain 
 the stature of romantic object, even when his motives were venal. He was, 
 in short, a higher class of crook than Fernandez. No “dime store Don 
 Juan” was Sigmund Engel. 
 
 The apogee of the postwar Feminine was also vividly illustrated by the 
 Journal American in its photo pages. Beneath the cloyingly cute headline 
 “Bronx Quads by the Basketful,” Mrs. Collins proudly displays her multi¬ 
 ple progeny: the infants loll in a clothes basket, their mother’s smile above 
 them full of healthy white teeth. Waving behind them, flag and standard 
 of the American dream, is a full line of wash. Everything is a startling 
 white. 79 Martha Beck could not be more clearly unlike this paragon of 
 white American motherhood. Her association with the props in this do¬ 
 mestic scene was a perverse one: she had drowned, not dandled, a baby in 
 a w^ashtub. Indeed, the governor of New York State, when commissioned 
 for clemency by the couple’s lawyers, was extraordinarily aware of the 
 difference between the maternal ideal and the portrait of the maternal 
 that Martha Beck represented. When Rosenberg was petitioning Gov¬ 
 ernor Thomas Dewey for clemency he made a plea that the governor 
 “remember the children!” (meaning Martha’s two children). Dewey ap¬ 
 parently replied scornfully that he did remember the children (a tw f o- 
 year-old drowned in tub of water), denying the plea as he did so. How r - 
 ever, it would be naive to assume that the governor acted solely upon 
 sound information. This anecdote, recalled by Henry Devine, can only 
 really demonstrate the currency of the stoiy, and all the ideas about Martha’s 
 monstrous femininity wdiich that story embodies. Its factual reliability is 
 of secondary importance. 80 Martha Beck, in very signal ways, represents 
 the nadir of the postw ar American Feminine. 
 
 In the death house the currency of love, to the .American public, must 
 
 ioo Murder 
 
have seemed a curious and corrupt one. The letters between Beck and 
 Fernandez published by the Journal American mixed ordinary props of 
 courting, like flowers, with less prosaic symbols. Martha wrote that “if I 
 have to go to the electric chair to prove my love —I’ll go.” The letters 
 were not consistently affectionate, as both parties — acting on the unreli¬ 
 able information of prison rumors — recriminated the other alternately 
 for their part in the crime or their lack of romantic attention. The crime 
 and the romance appeared once again entwined. The papers speculated 
 upon the wearing aspect of a relationship within which emotions vacil¬ 
 lated between jealous remonstrance and declarations of undying love. As 
 the execution watch became more focused, reporters tried to discover 
 which of the condemned lovers was threatening to break. The appeals 
 process suggested that Fernandez was employing the maximum in legal 
 strategy to turn aside his sentence, while Martha had merely fired her 
 lawyer. Martha would profit from any successful appeal on Fernandez’s 
 part, but the media scorned her stoicism as much as they did the vehe¬ 
 mence of Fernandez’s pleas for clemency. Perhaps they were not sur¬ 
 prised that she refused to struggle for what they saw as a “life spent 
 wallowing in enough abnormalities and crime to set any psychiatrist’s jaw 
 ajar.” The papers also noted that “in all the 21 months that she has been 
 in solitary [Martha] hasn’t had a single visitor,” in contrast to Fernandez’s 
 regular visits from his three sisters. This lack of filial feeling was under¬ 
 scored by the revelation that Martha hadn’t written once to her brother, 
 Dudley, “a Pensacola policeman.” 81 What kind of a sister was this who 
 wouldn’t write to the brother who raped her twice when she was thirteen 
 and then, when finally exposed, spoke rarely to her thereafter? 82 For 
 the daughter to be filial means: be good, submit, be selfless. Martha, in 
 prison, is held to account for her lack of filial obligation, just as she was 
 mocked by the prosecutor who said she wanted to “throw off the yoke of 
 motherhood” and that she couldn’t “very well stand the restraint of the 
 mother.” 83 Martha became “promiscuous” supposedly to escape and 
 punish her mother. That “promiscuity,” conceded by her own defense at 
 the trial, became a threat both to the ideology of the family and to the 
 literal family. Martha’s own reading of the romantic promise, that she 
 “dreamed of a family life better than [her] own” with herself at the center 
 as wife and mother, is obscured by the portrait of the failed romantic 
 subject: the bad daughter, the unmarried mother, “frigid.” 
 
 True Crime Romance I 101 
 
Martha resumed her place as the focus of press attention as the exe¬ 
 cution date approached. The provenance of the crime lay with Martha, 
 even as the press reported that “of the two, Fernandez now was . . . the 
 stronger ... in surprising contrast to his weak, wishy-washy, reluctant 
 attitude when Martha, on their sprees of murder, taunted him for being 
 spineless.” 84 
 
 Raymond declared that he would die like the man nobody thought he 
 was. But he was wrong about that. Execution commentators noted the 
 prison’s departure from convention when Martha, the only woman of the 
 four condemned to die that night, 85 was taken last to the chair. The paper 
 coming out on the eve of the execution had promised that “according to 
 prison protocol, it will be Martha who will die first, under the rule that 
 the weakest must have the swiftest end.” 86 The weaker turned out to be 
 “w r ishy-w-ashy” Raymond Fernandez, who followed Richard Power to the 
 chair. Fernandez was not perceptibly more shaken than Martha, but the 
 decision to execute her last would cap a script that had called for her to 
 take the lead role in the crime. Fernandez “walked to eternity in an 
 unspectacular manner except that he w r as unafraid.” 87 His last minutes 
 showed a controlled reserve: as he seated himself in the chair, witnesses 
 saw ? him reach dowm “to preserve the crease in his trousers as he sat.” This 
 ease could not save him in the eyes of the press. Fernandez died as the 
 man they thought he was: the “mail order Romeo,” primping to the end. 
 
 The order of execution was the final billing of Beck and Fernandez, 
 putting the seal upon Martha’s preeminence in the role of murderer. She 
 entered the death room and the witness “thought at once of the night¬ 
 marish dreams, as a child, when an ogress appeared to instill terror.” The 
 following lengthy description of her execution w r as, as ever, full of allu¬ 
 sions to her weight —as if it were the last, best evidence of the crime for 
 w hich she was dying: 
 
 You looked at this grotesque figure as it walked through the door, her head 
 bobbing from side to side, porcine, her eyes beaded in layers of fat. Then you 
 looked at the voluptuous mouth turned upward in a half smile. You looked at her 
 ankles, slim for the mountainous burden they carried, and at her hands, slender 
 and tapering and incongruous to the flaccid flesh above her elbows. 88 
 
 There is a lot of looking going on here. Unlike the description of Fer¬ 
 nandez’s death, a simple third-person narrative, Leon Racht here forces 
 
 102 Murder 
 
the reader to watch Martha with his eyes: the child’s eyes, beholding an 
 ogress. Racht told how Martha was “so big she had to wriggle to squeeze 
 herself into” the chair. Then he returned, as Dorothy Kilgallen had when 
 the trial opened, to the metaphor of those “incongruously” delicate 
 hands: 
 
 You looked at the slim hands and while pity tore at your soul, you remembered 
 then that those same tapered, red-laquered fingers had done to death women and 
 a baby. You thought of those hands wielding the death-dealing hammer.... And 
 you thought of the same hands forcing two-year-old Rainelle into a tub of muddy 
 water to drown her after her widowed mother had been murdered. 
 
 The killer’s hands “curled” and then “relaxed from the force of the cur¬ 
 rent.” When she was pronounced dead, her fingers were the same bright 
 red as her nail lacquer. Unwilling to let go of what he seemed to per¬ 
 ceive as the mark of the harlot, Racht observed in closing that the dead 
 woman’s “lipstick contrasted sickeningly with the whiteness of death.” 
 
 Even the death of Beck and Fernandez in the chair was not the final 
 scene in the drama of the Hearts Killers. The following day’s paper, 
 covering the scene of execution, passed on to the reader the last words 
 of the condemned and the farewell letters they exchanged. Martha’s 
 last statement, in which she wrote that her story was a “love story,” was 
 not printed complete; the press declined to reproduce her accusations 
 that they had portrayed her as “unfeeling, stupid and moronic” and had 
 made ridiculous assumptions based upon her weight alone. 89 Th e. Journal 
 American did publish in its entirety Ray’s “last note,” which was a medita¬ 
 tion on the nature of romantic love: “the most potent force in the world.” 
 Also published, transcribed, and photographically reproduced, was Mar¬ 
 tha’s poem, “Memo to Ray,” an innocuous piece of doggerel professing 
 her love for Ray. The inclusion of this photograph was consistent with the 
 obsessive attentiveness of the press to the physical traces or symbols of 
 Martha’s criminality. At the outset of the trial, a reporter had observed 
 that Martha wrote “left-handed, quickly, with her tongue between her 
 lips.” 90 The photo of Martha’s last poem is meant to reveal, in its form, 
 something that the content cannot convey. In much the same way, the 
 press looked not to her testimony (or even the testimony of others) for 
 the truth of Martha Beck, but to the word made flesh — the “obese” form, 
 the “fat” body of the ogress. 
 
 True Crime Romance I 103 
 
The in-depth coverage of the trial by the Journal American , among 
 other tabloids, established a pattern of misinformation invaluable for the 
 promotion of the tale of murder to the canon of true crime. Trial testi¬ 
 mony was embellished, an interpretive flourish that became increasingly 
 bold as time passed. The staple elements of the tale of the Honeymoon 
 Killers began to appear during the execution watch, when the press re¬ 
 minded its readers of the crime the couple were condemned for. In that 
 summary, the detailed testimony of the trial began to carry a new burden 
 of “fact” and inference about the killers. The crime was apparendy both 
 the result of an injudicious mixing of fates (folie a deux) and the conse¬ 
 quence of unnatural passions (principally those of the “woman who loved 
 too much”). One article introduced both readings in concert. Discussing 
 the crossing of paths that led the couple to the threshold of the death 
 chamber, Racht wrote: 
 
 Had not the spidery, vulturine Fernandez picked Martha’s name from a list of 200 
 he bought for $2 from a matrimonial agency, she, and perhaps even he, would not 
 be sitting in doom’s shadow today. 91 
 
 Racht makes the unusual suggestion that Fernandez was more predis¬ 
 posed to the fate of murderer than Martha — although this conclusion 
 should be read in the context of Racht’s coverage of Fernandez’s final plea 
 for clemency (as opposed to Martha’s silence). Ray’s path to murder is, 
 finally, a good deal less interesting than the trail of feminine desire that 
 crosses it. As Time observed, “[Ljittle Ray’s gift was his undoing, he 
 attracted his own nemesis, Mrs. Martha Jule Beck.” 92 Racht did a recap on 
 the character of that nemesis. Martha and the children came to New York 
 to be with Ray, but their reunion was hampered by the presence of the 
 children. Martha’s solution was soon forthcoming: 
 
 “I left them at the Salvation Army,” she said, blithely. “They’ll never find me. 
 Come, make love to me honey, we’re alone.” 
 
 The callous cruelty of this unnatural mother would have revolted the ordinary' 
 man. It only appeared to fascinate the warped Don Juan. He was in Martha’s web 
 now. And little did he dream he would strangle in it. 93 
 
 Martha’s “blithe” sexual invitation to Fernandez after abandoning her 
 children had nothing to support it in fact, but it was a portrait that went 
 well with the paper’s previous descriptions of Martha’s “iceberg calm” 
 
 104 Murder 
 
and “sordid” past. The portrait of Martha as the unnatural mother was a 
 serviceable one. Detailing the demise of Deliphine [hr] Downing and her 
 daughter Rainelle, Racht combined elements of the unnatural mother 
 and the failed nurse to play up the degree to which Martha’s “feminine 
 instincts” had been corrupted. After Ray had arrived to finish off Del- 
 phine with a shotgun blast to the head, “little Rainelle ... cried constantly 
 for two days.” Martha finally suggested they “put her down with her 
 mother” and they drowned the child “in a wash tub full of water.” 94 Just 
 two days later, the same writer changed the story of Rainelle’s death to 
 even better represent Martha as the doppelganger of the all-American 
 mother: “Mrs. Beck . . . admitted she held the Downing woman’s 20 
 month old daughter by its feet while immersing its head in the muddy 
 water in the murdered woman’s grave.” 95 
 
 Racht’s was a brief account of the crimes, but it was sufficient to indi¬ 
 cate the direction of the tale, and to place the lead players in their ap¬ 
 propriate poses. The tale left more than one question unanswered, but 
 it required — in a sense — precisely that uncertainty. The Journal Amer¬ 
 ican pointedly wondered (as would retired Assistant District Attorney 
 “Hank” Devine some forty years later) “how many others there might 
 have been.” 96 Uncertainty might suggest an end to speculation, and its fu¬ 
 tility, but not knowing in the tale of murder is the very engine of narration. 
 
 For a while Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez were “America’s Most 
 Hated Murderers” because, individually and as a couple, they had be¬ 
 come parodies of the postwar American romance. There was nothing 
 spectacular or outrageous in the method or number of their killings: the 
 papers carried daily reports of a huge number and variety of murders that 
 rivaled, or even excelled, the brutality of Beck’s and Fernandez’s crimes. 97 
 But the combination of the choice of victims, the fraud that led to their 
 deaths, and the supposed character of the killers was enough to seriously 
 unsettle a public who watched the unhappy convergence of the romance 
 and the tale of murder. 
 
 One early commentator, Wenzell Brown, attacked what he saw as the 
 root cause of Beck’s and Fernandez’s crimes: the romance industry of the 
 Lonely Hearts clubs. Although the killers were dead, “no lessons seem to 
 have been learned.... Even the Lonely Hearts clubs continue to advertise 
 unmolested, and the roots of evil —neglect and indifference — remain 
 
 True Crime Romance I 105 
 
untouched.” 98 For Brown, the Lonely Hearts clubs formed a predatory 
 ground for unscrupulous men who would take advantage of a demo¬ 
 graphics of marriage that left a great many women spinsters or widows. 99 
 These women were likely to become the victims of their own dreams of 
 romance, for in Brown’s analysis women dreamed while men merely 
 schemed: 
 
 The women that fell under [Fernandez’s] spell were for the most part, a sorry 
 array. Most of them were elderly and unattractive. Some were grossly stout, one 
 was badly deformed. They were mosdy women whom an average man would not 
 give a second glance — women who had been passed by life and who were grasping 
 desperately at any vestige of romance. 100 
 
 On the other hand, the few men who joined such clubs were, in Brown’s 
 opinion, either psychopaths, degenerates, fortune hunters, or crimi¬ 
 nals. 101 In his discussion of the trial, Brown expanded his analysis of 
 vulnerable, sillv women schooled in romantic dreams: 
 
 Who came to witness the trial? Perhaps there were a few serious students, inter¬ 
 ested in the processes of law. But in large they were plump, middle-aged or elderly 
 w omen seeking vicarious thrills. . . . These were the type of silly, over-sexed, 
 frustrated females upon whom Raymond Fernandez had fed his vanity. 102 
 
 With that supposition, the crimes came full circle: the spectators be¬ 
 come the victims, among w r hose number one of the murderers could, 
 herself, theoretically be located. 103 Certainly Brown makes harsh and ill- 
 informed judgments about the women who seek mates through Lonely 
 Hearts clubs, but he is dead-on in his analysis of the vulnerability of these 
 women to their romantic dreams. What Brown cannot fathom, however, 
 is the substance of those dreams in a culture that puts a high valence on 
 the romance. So credible was that dream of romance that Martha Beck, 
 murderer, died for it. 
 
 106 Murder 
 
5. True Crime Romance II: 
 Portentous Meetings 
 
 The outsider’s view remains hazy, cinematic, exaggerated, formed by cop-operas 
 and a chaos of statistics. To the outsider, American murder seems as vehement 
 and anarchic as American free enterprise, or American neurosis, or American 
 profanity. . . . But sometimes, and far more worryingly in a way, shapes and 
 bearings do emerge from the turmoil and portents are suddenly visible among all 
 the blood. Martin Amis 
 
 What has always seemed to me of paramount interest... is contained not in the 
 word “Who?” but in the word “Why?” Marie Belloc Lowndes 
 
 Two years after the deaths of Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez 
 another couple was executed, by lethal gas, in Missouri. A member of the 
 press attending the execution sketched the scene for the papers. Beneath 
 the curious gaze of the spectators a man and a woman sit strapped into the 
 twin chairs of the death chamber. The prurient artist has drawn Bonnie 
 Heady and Gus Hall awaiting death in nothing but their underwear, 
 thereby committing fraud upon a public reasonably familiar with the 
 formal modesty of the execution routine: the condemned dressed to show 
 as little of the mess of their extinction as possible (black trousers for men, 
 the dun-colored prison frock for women). This fanciful portrait accentu¬ 
 ates one of the central motifs in the tale of murder shared by Heady and 
 Hall, Beck and Fernandez, as well as innumerable others: the murderous 
 couple as lovers. 
 
 The psychiatric category of thefolie a deux has contributed a great deal 
 to the repertoire of the true crime tale of murder. In the previous chapter 
 I showed how contemporary accounts of the Hearts Killers cast their tale 
 
as a romance (albeit a romance gone wrong, its lovers having become 
 parodic figures). As the tale of the Hearts Killers percolated through the 
 cultural conduits of the news media it came, by and by, to the attention of 
 non-American readers. The English narrators found the Hearts Killers 
 after the murderous lovers had themselves died, no longer available to 
 trouble the script of the drama with their niggling voices. That tale, 
 written as a romance through the powerful and complex workings of a set 
 of references particular to American culture, was integrated into a wider 
 generic structure by the English commentators who adopted it. While 
 the murderous careers of Beck and Fernandez seemed to those outsiders 
 to be exotic and thoroughly American, they were also received as part of a 
 wider Western culture: one of love and its excesses; of madness, obses¬ 
 sion, cruelty, and the folie a deux. This second stage in the scoring of 
 the drama of the Hearts Killers was significant in that it was these En¬ 
 glish accounts (along with Wenzell Brown’s) that would inspire the final 
 (and most influential of all) American tale of the Honeymoon Killers: 
 namely, Leonard Castle’s 1970 film of that name. 
 
 Folie a Deux 
 
 The elision of “insanity” and “abnormality” that occurred in the legal and 
 psychiatric arguments condemning Beck and Fernandez was not coinci¬ 
 dental—it was, in fact, encumbent upon the concept of folie a deux. Few 
 successful defenses have been mounted on the basis of folie a deux, one of 
 those few being Clarence Darrow’s famous plea for mitigation of sen¬ 
 tence in the trial of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, whose 1924 
 murder of young Bobby Franks for “thrills” had so scandalized the Amer¬ 
 ican public. The beauty of Darrow’s strategy was that, by pleading the 
 boys guilty, he could produce psychiatric evidence of their “abnormality” 
 (rather than their insanity) to mitigate sentence, thereby avoiding alto¬ 
 gether the knotty problem of arguing their innocence. 1 Other advocates 
 who followed the strategy tended to forget this vital point and would 
 argue for the lives of their clients on the basis of their “abnormality,” 
 when the jury was charged only with weighing evidence of “insanity’.” 
 The slippage between “abnormality” and “insanity” was literally and rhe- 
 
 108 Murder 
 
torically dangerous, providing the space for the folie a deux to come un¬ 
 stuck from its psychiatric context. So abstracted, folie a deux became a 
 descriptive and explanatory narrative structure in the tale of murder. 
 
 The psychiatric definition of folie a deux is itself pretty loose. One 
 proponent of the type explained its possibilities: “ Folie a deux or commu¬ 
 nicated insanity ... is induced by a stronger character, the inducer, upon 
 the weaker, the inducee (folie imposee) but delusions may occur simulta¬ 
 neously by reciprocal influence in predisposed associated individuals (fo- 
 liesimultan.ee ).” 2 Whether folie imposee or folie simultanee, “communicated 
 insanity” suggests a portentous moment of meeting between individuals 
 whose monstrous natures are not necessarily created in the forge of that 
 union, but activated. The folie d deux allows the search for murder’s origin 
 to backtrack a “predisposition” to psychosis, while also portraying a mur¬ 
 derousness that belongs not to a single individual but to the third entity — 
 the lovers —that, contradictorily, stands between, unites, and separates 
 the actual lovers. 
 
 Just a year after the double execution of the Hearts Killers, the first 
 extensive study of the case came out in print . 3 Its tide promised to deliver 
 the “unpublished facts” behind the case, and the author, Wenzell Brown, 
 had been busy in the newspaper archives. (Like much crime journalism of 
 the era, Brown’s work is woefully short of cited sources. The factual basis 
 of his revelations must therefore remain largely untested.) Despite his 
 reliance on newspaper reports, Brown was quick to chastise the papers for 
 their simple-minded assessment of the murderers: 
 
 The tabloids vied with one another in printing sensational stories.... [S]trangely 
 enough, none of the newspaper stories equaled reality in its grotesque detail. If 
 Martha Beck had been the stony, emotionless and fully vicious creature of news¬ 
 paper accounts, she would be of little interest. Similarly, if Ray Fernandez had 
 been simply a small-time gigolo, a craven coward dominated by a masculine 
 woman, he too would be worthy only of passing clinical attention. 4 
 
 Brown began to redraw the murderers to fit the space cut out for them by 
 an inaccurate but sensationalizing press. His revelations about Martha 
 Beck were few, but his attention to the detail of her “difference” and its 
 implications was indeed tireless. His portrait of Fernandez also went 
 
 True Crime Romance II 109 
 
substantially deeper into its subject than had the former commentators. 
 He revealed, for instance, that Ray had become a practitioner in voodoo 
 when he was imprisoned in Florida in the early 1940s. 5 While Martha’s 
 predisposition to murder came from her misanthropism, Ray’s originated 
 with the head injury that left his mind idle and his moods uncertain. 
 Brown seemed reasonably sure that Martha would not have taken to 
 murder had she not met Ray, and Ray would never have followed the 
 murderous path so far if not for Martha/' Like Leon Racht, Brown hinted 
 that the couples’ crimes were the result of folie a deux: “each somehow 
 brought out the latent evil in the other and magnified it until it burst forth 
 in the form of insensate brutality.” 7 
 
 By introducing the spectre of the folie d deux , Brown was able to retain 
 his focus on the murderous dispositions of both parties (their “latent 
 evil”) while also bringing in the fatal scene of murder: the criminal indus¬ 
 try of their partnership. Biology and fate combine: chance and predestiny. 
 Both elements are essential to the polished narrative of murder. The 
 history of the murderers provides for the origin of the act and its funda¬ 
 mental (rather than immediate) motive, while the meeting/melding of 
 the principals sets the scene for the actual murders. Only then can the 
 narrative proceed tidily, made distinctive by its sense of portent. Its moral 
 is to be gleaned from the structural peaks of the tale of murder: the mur¬ 
 der’s foretelling, its occurrence, and its echo in the execution of the prin¬ 
 cipals. The moral of the story lies in the diminution of mystery, in the 
 conjured solution to the question repeatedly asked of murder: “Why?” 
 The answer pretends confidence, but is querulous and paradoxical: the 
 murder happens because of the murderer. And even that answer is a trick. 
 There is no murderer until the murder. Although the tale of murder should 
 not be confused with that other exemplary crime story, the detective 
 mystery, both share the doubling structure of the “open” story of the 
 investigation and the “hidden” story of the crime: “the initial crime on 
 which the tale of detection is predicated is an end as well as a beginning. ” 8 
 In the true crime genre, the tale of detection very often takes the form not 
 of the chronicle of police attempts to identify and capture the murderer 
 (although that is an integral part of the genre), but of the revelation of an 
 undetected psychology in the life of the murderer. It is therefore the 
 psychologist who is the detecting hero of the piece. 9 It is not the identi¬ 
 fication of the killer that provides jouissance in the true crime tale (as it 
 
 no Murder 
 
does in detective fiction), but the ascription of an intelligible motive for 
 the crime. 
 
 The tale of the Honeymoon Killers enters the canon of true crime as 
 one of portent and metaphor. The discursive obligation on Martha to 
 embody the bulk of the story’s violence is more insistent in the developed 
 tale. Thus, the “glandular disorder” responsible for Martha’s obesity and 
 exaggerated sexual drive was “not a mental state but a physical one over 
 which she had no control.” 10 Brown’s apparent kindness in excusing her 
 moral blame is a red herring. So much of what Martha is and does is of the 
 body. That which is not corporeal is entirely banished. There is no moral 
 stature in the misanthropic figure of the murderess. 
 
 Brown, with the leisure not allowed the newspaper reporter to con¬ 
 struct a detailed history of the subject, tells, for the first time, the tale of 
 murder’s origin. “Fat Martha” does not just appear in (and as) the text: we 
 see her grow. Brown draws this figure out of the past — a fat child, sexually 
 abused, whose “ovarian-pituitary disorder” made different both her ap¬ 
 pearance and the uncontrollable desires it so poorly masked. The writer, 
 believing he has found the subject he has just created, wonders why no 
 one could have predicted there would be trouble with Martha Beck: 
 
 Martha . . . had a . . . glandular disorder which made itself visible when she was a 
 young child. Her physical development into womanhood at the age of nine did 
 not escape the loungers who hung about the Milton drug store. It should have 
 been obvious to any trained person who came in touch with the monstrously fat 
 child that certain psychological mutilations were inevitable." 
 
 Brown is not saying that murder would be the final outcome of those 
 “certain psychological mutilations”; he would not be so crude. The tele¬ 
 ological imperative of the tale of murder is such that the most innocuous 
 signs indicate the conclusion to the action, the final and identifying mark 
 of the murderer. That “monstrously fat child” is a murderer because she 
 will become one. Brown goes beyond picturing Martha’s moral state 
 mired in the vast territory of her body. Her body itself has a shadow, its 
 excess baggage. Her fat is fate: 
 
 As Martha grew older, some of her outward problems diminished. While she 
 remained excessively stout, she also grew taller. No longer was she the sex-ridden 
 little monstrosity of her elementary school days.... Martha’s tortured need for sex 
 
 True Crime Romance II 111 
 
gratification, however, did not lessen. The glandular disorder worked her body 
 with the most violent sex urges.. .. The nature of her original sexual experience 
 filled her with horror, but it could not subdue the craving within her. Fear and 
 desire vied with each other and kept her in a constant state of agitation. 12 
 
 The layers of fat are simultaneously a mask to her true nature, its sign, 
 and a mere shadow of the monstrosity that is Martha Beck. Like the 
 prosecution in the trial, Brown reads Martha’s alleged “frigidity” as the 
 result of desire’s excess, not its lack. On the foundation of her childhood 
 rape he can therefore logically build a history of promiscuity that culmi¬ 
 nates in her liaison with Fernandez. The sexual scene of their literal and 
 figurative coming together is initial evidence of thefolie a deux as murder’s 
 origin: 
 
 [F]or the first time in her life Martha obtained full sexual gratification. Fernandez, 
 schooled in the ways of sex, introduced Martha to erotic practices of which she 
 had no knowledge. Her response was so violent, so uninhibited, that even Fer¬ 
 nandez was frightened.... The big nurse gave herself to the Spaniard with fierce, 
 almost animalistic abandon. She wept, sobbed that she should remain with him 
 forever, even begged to be beaten. 13 
 
 Ray’s attention closes the circuit of desire for Martha. As she experiences 
 sexual fulfillment for the first time, the hidden essence of her monstrosity 
 and its shadow territory outside the body suddenly unite, drawn once 
 again into the body’s lineaments. 
 
 Th efolie d deux calls for the collision of two flawed personalities to be 
 immediate and decisive. At the moment of collision, the psychological (or 
 physical) flaws that previously marked out only an uncertain difference 
 now mark out its refinement: the two as one, as murderer. Brown col¬ 
 lapses the order of events that came out in the trial (and invents others 
 entirely) in order to make the meeting of Fernandez and Beck sufficiently 
 fatal. To that end, he must bring forward Martha’s discovery of orgasmic 
 pleasure and make it the result not of a doctor’s advice, but of Fernandez’s 
 particular sexual skills. 14 All of the elements of her obsession are fore¬ 
 shadowed in that initial union: the declaration of eternal love; her mas¬ 
 ochism. Also present is the surrender, or seduction, of Fernandez’s will, 
 and the clue to Martha’s dominance. He is frightened and flattered by her 
 passion. 
 
 112 Murder 
 
Portents of Pathology 
 
 Brown’s reconstruction of Martha Beck establishes a second error neces¬ 
 sary to the structure of portent in the tale of murder. Martha testified at 
 her trial that she had initially chosen to become a mortician; forbidden 
 this choice by her mother, she went on to train as a nurse instead. Brown, 
 however, has Martha’s first job be that of assistant to a local funeral 
 director: 
 
 At last a job came along. It was a frightful, gruesome job that might well have 
 shattered the nerves of a well-adjusted and hardened woman. A local mortician 
 hired her to wash, embalm, and prepare for burial the female corpses which were 
 brought to his establishment. 15 
 
 Martha’s only contact with the mortician’s trade, in fact (apart from her 
 thwarted desire to enter this male-dominated field), was her friendship 
 with the couple who ran the Milton funeral home, the Baggetts. Mr. 
 Baggett drove the ambulance for the hospital where Martha worked. 
 Brown creates the fiction of Martha’s first job as undertaker’s assistant, 
 then joins that story to the actual chronology of her sudden exposure to 
 romance literature. The image of a young woman wedded to the romance 
 tale while working with the dead presents, for Brown, a more accurate 
 prototype for Martha’s pathology than does that same woman reading 
 the romance novels in the library of the “Women’s Club” where she 
 worked: 16 “The thought of the huge, highly emotional fat girl trying to 
 shut out the scenes and scents of the dead by dreaming of passion and 
 romance is grisly beyond words.” 17 The portentous quality of this early 
 collision of love and death is underscored by Brown: “years later when 
 she had killed two women and a child she recalled these days” in the 
 mortician’s service. 18 The implied irony is that Martha’s caring for the 
 female bodies of the dead, her intimacy with them, became the greater 
 intimacy of the murderer with the corpse of her victim. 
 
 The finishing stroke to this portrait of the pathological origins of Mar¬ 
 tha Beck is Brown’s insistence on her promiscuity. Martha was long at the 
 mercy of the desires engendered in her by a “pituitary-ovarian defi¬ 
 ciency”; 19 yet, because of her “abnormal bodily structure,” she was some¬ 
 how unable to satisfy that desire. Brown takes up the tone of Martha’s 
 mother’s chiding voice as he repeats her charges against the daughter that 
 
 True Crime Romance II 113 
 
shamed the Seabrook clan. Martha, for instance, is said to have been 
 dismissed from the maternity hospital where she was working in 1944 
 because men had been “coming to her room” and she had been “running 
 around all the time.” 20 In fact, Martha resigned her position at the Pen¬ 
 sacola Maternity Hospital in order to have an illegitimate child, whose 
 arrival she had duly warned the board of directors about. The board 
 suggested that she take a leave of absence and return to them (their 
 implication being that the baby would be adopted). She refused that offer 
 precisely because she wanted to keep the child. 21 Yet Martha’s own story 
 of this fatherless first child— controversial enough in 1949 —is not suffi¬ 
 cient for the portrayal of her promiscuity. It is necessary, instead, that she 
 be found out , that her desires be exposed as duplicitous. That duplicity — 
 arising as much from her inability to satisfy her desires; from the tension 
 of a bodily condition that heightens her libido and a body that will not 
 allow her satisfaction — disappears at the moment of her union with Fer¬ 
 nandez. Discovering desire commits Martha both to keeping it and to 
 owning up to it. Thus she moves from being secretly promiscuous to 
 reveling in her abnormality. That brazen quality is the final portent of 
 Martha’s pathology. Murder is the result of the emotional largesse of the 
 sexual obsessive, a grand gesture in the sexual repertoire of the erot¬ 
 omaniac. Thus, Brown wondered at the prurience of the jurors who 
 convicted Beck. Did they not see the whole picture of the deranged 
 sexuality hidden beneath her mere vulgarity? 
 
 Afterward, individual jurors said that they were swayed by the coarse language, 
 the exhibitionism of the defendants. But would a normal man or woman deliber¬ 
 ately use the expressions, the vulgar speech, the obscenities employed by Martha 
 Beck when she knew her life was at stake? 22 
 
 Brown has plumbed the depths beneath the tabloids’ shallow sketch of 
 the “stony, emotionless and fully vicious creature” that is Martha Beck. 
 The “real” murderer is the one whose origins are clear. The function of 
 portent in the tale of murder is to make the murderer big enough to 
 contain the displaced questions of murder. To write “ Why?” back into the 
 story is to write the story backwards: to arrive at the murderer at the tale's outset. 
 
 In Brow n’s text, Ray Fernandez occupies a position of surrogate domi¬ 
 nance. His black moods, the result of a brain injury, predispose him to 
 violence, and yet he is a more feckless villain than Martha. Once again, it 
 
 114 Murder 
 
is his questionable stature as a Lothario that is the basis of his pathology. 
 Brown reports that Ray’s attachment to voodoo allowed him to believe he 
 could hypnotize women. The writer gives little credence to that gift, 
 allowing instead that Ray had power over women who tended to be “silly, 
 over-sexed, frustrated” and, of course, middle-aged. 23 Such women, for 
 Brown, are pitifully gullible. Fernandez’s powers of persuasion need 
 not have been great, his charms only skin deep. Much of that which is 
 Ray slides around on the surface, unlike the layered mystery of Martha’s 
 pathology. Given this shallowness, the structure of portent is less pro¬ 
 nounced for the tale of murder in which Ray is object. We are, for in¬ 
 stance, given intimations of the weakness that will bond him to Martha — 
 one of those women he, as seducer, is meant to be manipulating. Brown 
 tells us that Ray apparently had a fondness for “big women” at the brothel 
 he frequented in New Orleans, Sammie’s Bowery Follies. 24 Being weak, 
 he is attracted by the substance of these women, a solidity that marks not 
 strength but vulnerability in a culture that punishes ugliness. Ray is se¬ 
 duced by his own power to seduce. His ability to bring Martha to orgasm 
 for the first time “enslaves” him to her desire, because it is imperative that 
 he be desired. His vanity is his downfall. Brown pictures Ray purchasing 
 the ubiquitous toupee on his own account just after his release from jail in 
 Florida. 25 Ray’s narcissism in the tale of murder means that he is a subject 
 that refuses the position of subject: his gaze is directed inward. His vanity, 
 his weakness, the suggestibility demonstrated by his belief in voodoo — all 
 point toward the erasure of his place as murderous subject in the text. 
 Ray’s murderousness is supplementary in character. Essentially, the struc¬ 
 ture of portent for Ray tends to strengthen the complete tale of murder as 
 a folie a deux. 
 
 The murder of Janet Fay occurs more or less at the middle of the book, 
 and is closely followed by an account of the Downing murders. 26 This 
 places the event of murder as the pivot between the unraveling of origins 
 in the first part of the text and, in the final section, the fated end of 
 judgment and execution. Brown’s willy-nilly distortions of Martha’s biog¬ 
 raphy cannot alter his uncanny faith in her, and his reliance upon her, as 
 subject in the tale of murder. Brown’s account of the Fay murder is a 
 peculiar blend of the eight versions I have identified in the Appendix. It 
 most clearly resembles that of the defense — leaving out any evidence of 
 premeditation, yet offering the motive (and explanation) that is so sin- 
 
 True Crime Romance II 115 
 
gularly lacking in any account tendered by the actual murderers. Ray asks 
 Martha why she did it, and she replies: “I don’t know. I saw her making up 
 to you and I just couldn’t stand it. Everything went black and the next 
 thing I knew she was dead.” 27 This piece of dialogue echoes Martha’s 
 lawyer, Herbert Rosenberg, telling the jury on summation “how” (i.e., 
 “why”) the murder happened. There is a tension here between the un¬ 
 answerable and unanswered question of how/why the murder occurred (a 
 moment of aphasia in the narrative literally marked by Martha’s “am¬ 
 nesia”) and the teleological imperative of the murderer’s invention. The 
 event of murder is foreshadowed by the structure of portent because it 
 cannot be clearly limned at the moment of its occurrence. 28 The contra¬ 
 diction, therefore, is that the murderer must precede the murder itself. 
 Martha’s view of the murder structures Brown’s account because she, 
 necessarily, is the subject of the tale of murder. While she does not “re¬ 
 member” the murder, and by her own account did not mean to kill, the 
 irony is that her word gains authority in the text because it is the word of 
 the murderer. 
 
 Martha’s presence at the murder is a slippery one. She has no conscious 
 presence, and yet so much of the tale of her murderous origin is a story of 
 the body, not the psyche. There is a bitter irony in Martha’s amnesia. 
 Ray’s absence at the moment of the murder is literal, but once he returns 
 to the room he ceases, in a way, to be there. His presence has less sub¬ 
 stance than Martha’s. While he reacts hysterically, she is grounded in the 
 bloody practicalities: 
 
 Fernandez tried to lift the body and, when he did so, blood gushed from the 
 wound. Martha, with her hospital training and her experience in the mortuary, 
 suddenly became calm and collected. “We’ve got to stop the bleeding,” she told 
 Ray, “or it will drip through the floor to the ceiling below.” 
 
 Fernandez grabbed up a scarf from the table and shaped it into a tourniquet.... 
 He was sobbing now and his hands were trembling so that he dropped everything 
 he touched. Martha, on the other hand, had regained her composure. 29 
 
 She is “collected,” while he drops everything he touches. It is that very 
 immanence, that being whole in the face of murder, which marks out 
 Martha as the murderer. Despite the subcategory of the folie simultanee , 
 the folie a deux generally structures a dominant partner in the fatal pair¬ 
 ing. 50 The interdependence of both partners in the concoction of the 
 
 116 Murder 
 
chemistry that leads to murder is a defining characteristic of the folie a 
 deux, but it is also one that must be elided. Martha’s dominance in the tale 
 of murder is complete, so much so that her presence sometimes over¬ 
 whelms the plotting of the tale as folie a deux. Ray’s presence provides 
 the necessary stage for the murder, but it is Martha who occupies the 
 spotlight. 
 
 “A Typically American Crime” 
 
 In the years after their deaths, “America’s Most Hated Murderers” did 
 indeed take their place in the canon of true crime, a place assured them by 
 Brown’s attention to detail in his reconstruction of their characters, if not 
 of the case. Brown’s reauthoring of the contemporary tale of the Hearts 
 Killers became the casting-off place for English commentaries that be¬ 
 gan, if they did not complete, the journey of Beck’s and Fernandez’s tale 
 of murder into the canon of true crime. The couple’s crimes must have 
 seemed, to the English, a telltale combination of peculiarly American 
 excess: commercial greed, obsessive romance, and routine violence. The 
 Hearts Killers were therefore quickly adopted as exemplary figures of 
 American criminality by a number of English commentators. 
 
 It is appropriate to deal with these accounts here because they had a 
 profound influence on the shape of a B-grade film version of the crimes 
 that would attain cult status: The Honeymoon Killers. It is appropriate to 
 take up the English treatment of the “doings” of the Hearts Killers be¬ 
 cause, as it has already been noted, the sources for authority in the tale of 
 murder are diverse, and tales of murder (however particular their histor¬ 
 ical and cultural codings) are by nature intertextual. 
 
 There is material enough for a whole other work on the fascination 
 that American murder holds for English true crime writers. Even the 
 most reductive of these tours of Yankee murderousness offers an under¬ 
 standing — albeit a simplistic one —that crime is culturally constructed. 
 Five of the most “obvious” elements of that particularity are commonly 
 identified: 
 
 1. the wide availability of guns 
 
 2. the history and culture of organized crime (the Mafia, gangs, drug lords, etc.) 
 
 True Crime Romance II 117 
 
3. the racial and regional demographics of crime 
 
 4. the identification of the “serial killer” by and in American jurisdictions (al¬ 
 though there is a respectable European antecedent in the “mass killer”) 
 
 5. the continued existence of the state’s power to kill its killers 
 
 These “factors” —so identified— are simplistic as well as mystifying, not 
 equal to analyses of the complex phenomena that define “murder” at any 
 one time in the United States. (True crime, as a genre, is notoriously 
 conventional in what it counts as murder, and its power to plumb a 
 culture’s construction of its crimes of violence is consequendy limited.) 
 
 During the late 1950s, three English accounts came out in quick suc¬ 
 cession, 31 each claiming for the Hearts Killers the dubious honor of 
 being two of the most famous or notorious murderers of the century. 32 
 H. Montgomery Hyde, a prolific writer of crime and espionage nonfic¬ 
 tion, wrote an account that (like many of his works) reproduced the 
 accusatory tone and content of previous studies while still appearing 
 to reserve judgment. 33 His restraint and apparent fidelity to the facts 
 are belied, however, by his assertion that the “case caused a sensation 
 throughout America. Besides focusing attention on the scandal of the 
 Lonely Hearts Club, it brought up the whole question of crime and 
 abnormality.” 34 “Crime and abnormality” had been a burning question 
 for a century or so before the Honeymoon Killers appeared. Neither it, 
 nor they, were anything new. For Montgomery Hyde, like other com¬ 
 mentators, “abnormality” had its silent partner in the term “sexuality.” 
 Not only is “sexuality” sublimated in the term “abnormality,” but it is 
 encoded in the romance — a genre that trades on carnal as well as material 
 pleasures. Montgomery Hyde’s acceptance of the pair as exemplary mur¬ 
 derers explains at least partly the fascination that the two would continue 
 to exert for the next decade. The case of the Honeymoon Killers, in the 
 guise of thefolie a deux , should still be read — bifocally — through the lens 
 of the romance and crime genres. 
 
 David Rowan’s account was a relatively terse one, heavily reliant upon 
 news reports and, tellingly, upon Brown’s wnrk. Alone of all the in-depth 
 portraits of Beck and Fernandez, culminating in the film version of their 
 exploits, 35 Rowan’s resists the temptation to refine the sensationalist and 
 mythic aspects of the case. His account refuses to occupy the position of 
 the murderer as subject, and is accordingly less inclined to stress the 
 
 118 Murder 
 
dominance of Martha Beck. Without her looming presence in the text, 
 Rowan’s tale of murder demonstrates the “How?” and not the “Why?” of 
 those infamous killings. The chronicle flirts briefly with Ray’s sensibilities 
 (his vanity, to be exact), 36 but ultimately stands outside both antago¬ 
 nists — content to survey the two as objects. For all of that, Rowan is 
 glaringly wrong on a few of his facts and happily confuses the chronology 
 of Beck’s and Fernandez’s initial romance. 37 Still, his account more closely 
 resembles the “facts” of the case than any other since the brief write-up in 
 Time. Rowan is not, however, entirely immune to the importance of the 
 case constructed by the media, and reauthored by Brown, in which de¬ 
 scriptive and analytic excess restages the event of murder in the much 
 larger and more appealing venue of the murderer’s mind. For Rowan, like 
 the trial jury itself, “the whole flavour of the case suggested something far 
 uglier than criminal unbalance.” 38 That ugliness indicates the much pro¬ 
 claimed degeneracy of the couple, while also gesturing toward the signifi¬ 
 cance of the romantic text in the tale of murder. 
 
 Rowan’s story is in two parts, comprising the crime and the trial and 
 then the long wait in the death house. It may be Rowan’s status as an 
 outsider, as intellectual “tourist,” that leads him to section off the story of 
 Beck’s and Fernandez’s continuing romance in the death house. The 
 “tourist” is much more likely to perceive elements of culture as “ar¬ 
 tifacts,” as discrete objects, remote from a context that he or she is not 
 privy to. In such circumstances the “artifact” can become invested with all 
 kinds of meaning —at once perplexing, mysterious, and eerily familiar. 39 
 Rowan may, on the other hand, simply have wanted to keep a strict sense 
 for scene and chronology. His decision to include a second chapter on the 
 years in Sing Sing is, at any rate, an interesting one. Rowan justified this 
 structure: 
 
 After the conviction of the pair, most people would have remembered only 
 the salient facts of the murders. The couples’ characters would have become 
 blurred — unpleasant, but indefinite. 
 
 . . . Yet it might have been anticipated that Fernandez and Mrs. Beck would 
 prove exceptions. Their personalities could not, would not be ignored. With each 
 new killing they had boasted of their love for one another. From now on, they 
 flaunted the boast even louder, in a manner which was to add an entire new 
 section to their story. 40 
 
 True Crime Romance II 119 
 
The time in the death cells is not a mere postscript, but the final act that 
 reveals the larger meaning of the drama. Quite apart from the keen 
 interest shown in how a condemned prisoner is “taking it,” the execution 
 sequence in the tale of murder provides the scene for those portentous 
 clues to be more fully played out. 
 
 In the quote just above, Rowan suggests that Beck and Fernandez made 
 a spectacle of themselves with their continuing mutual obsession. They 
 called attention to themselves at a time when the public normally would 
 cease (at least until execution night) to be interested in their story. That 
 unregeneracy of character proves to Rowan the case for the couple’s pride 
 of place in the true crime canon. They are there of their own accord — 
 because their very peculiarity demands it. But say we look at that con¬ 
 tinued notoriety another way. Beck and Fernandez did maintain their 
 relationship at a high emotional pitch, creating, on at least one occasion, 
 problems for the prison administration. 41 At such times, they could not 
 help but attract the attention of the press. Still, it is not as if the news 
 media were steadfastly looking the other way. Rowan’s “entire new sec¬ 
 tion” to the story is based upon copies of the letters between Beck and 
 Fernandez that were passed by prison censors directly to the press. That 
 material became saleable precisely because it fitted in with the already 
 existing script on the Hearts Killers: the public still wanted to read a 
 romance. 
 
 It is worthwhile here to consider the different publicity given to (or, 
 more pointedly, withheld from) another couple incarcerated in Sing Sing 
 just a few months after the executions of Beck and Fernandez. Ethel and 
 Julius Rosenberg were indisputably notorious: “atom bomb spies” who 
 had supposedly sacrificed their parental role for that of communist con¬ 
 spirator. The news media consistently ignored the Rosenbergs because 
 their story ran counter to the generic grain of Cold War discourse. 42 It 
 was owing entirely to their own efforts and to the bravado of one left- 
 liberal newspaper that the Rosenbergs’ story began to be heard at all. 
 Atom bomb spies were arguably no less interesting and complex than 
 murderers to the American public in 1951, but Ethel and Julius Rosen¬ 
 berg never figured in the press as anything other than stereotypical com¬ 
 munist dupes, certainly not as parents or lovers. Their primary loyalty 
 was instead to the shibboleth of communism. Those agitating for clem¬ 
 ency on the Rosenbergs’ behalf stressed the romantic, domestic, and 
 
 120 Murder 
 
familial connections denied by a press that remorselessly wrote the story 
 of the Rosenbergs in the spy genre. 43 The spy as lover seemed not as 
 potent a cultural text as the murder as folie a deux: the tale of the mur¬ 
 derous lovers. 44 
 
 The story of the last months of Beck and Fernandez in Sing Sing is told 
 as one of love’s, rather than justice’s, vicissitudes. Here the structure of 
 portent is bolstered by a continued emphasis on the couples’ romance 
 and, in particular, on Martha’s fervor. Rowan’s “The Death House” ends, 
 typically, as he tells how the prison authorities decided to take Martha last 
 to the chair, where she “died with a faint smile on her lips.” 45 That “faint 
 smile,” in Rowan’s as in others’ readings, was not the nervous rictus of 
 someone about to die under the gaze of a packed audience, 46 but the smile 
 of a woman who dies knowing herself loved. 
 
 The tale of the “death house romance” is integral to the elevation of 
 Beck and Fernandez to the canon of true crime. Only the tale of murder 
 become romance can justify Rowan’s observation that, despite widespread 
 disapproval of capital punishment, “not a single voice — for possibly the 
 only time in record — was raised in public protest against the decision to 
 execute them.” Rowan is logically unable to account for this singular lack 
 of public sympathy, despite his contention that Beck and Fernandez were 
 “termed ‘America’s Most Hated Killers’ with good reason.” The “three 
 brutal murders that were admitted . . . and the many more that were 
 feared” were not sufficient explanation, but are all that remains if the 
 murder is read outside the romantic script that is its true context. 47 
 
 In the Canon of True Crime 
 The Honeymoon Killers 
 
 Apart from Paul Buck’s The Honeymoon Killers , which has recently been 
 reprinted in the prestigious Blue Murder series, Bruce Sanders’s essay on 
 Beck and Fernandez is one of the few in print today. 48 It is also one of the 
 longest. 49 Sanders described Beck and Fernandez as “the most incredible 
 lovers in the twentieth century, people belonging to a nightmare, living 
 characters no novelist or playwright could employ in a plot with any 
 presence of reality.” Then he cautioned, “and yet they were real enough, 
 horribly so.” 50 In his brief introduction to the volume in which “The 
 
 True Crime Romance II 121 
 
Incredible Lovers” first appeared, Sanders makes one of the most fre¬ 
 quently heard boasts of the true crime writer: 
 
 [These] stories are more compelling than any fiction, more illuminating than 
 pages of criminological statistics or columns of figures arrived at by commissions 
 and committees with no brief to evaluate instincts and emotions, but only acts and 
 deeds. 
 
 And to what end these most elucidating tales of murder? Not merely 
 entertainment, which would be too base a motive for the unraveling of 
 such mystery. The problem of murder limned in the narrative should 
 provide a key to its own solution: 
 
 The violence recorded provides a problem in human relations that appears insol¬ 
 uble. Yet it is a problem that must be faced and tackled, and it cannot be tackled 
 adequately or successfully unless it is understood. Towards this end these narra¬ 
 tives are presented as human documents. 51 
 
 The tale of the murder literally stands in for the “columns of figures,” the 
 reports of commissions and committees of inquiry. The murderer is at 
 last admitted as a sign. This bold claim is made in the authoritative voice 
 of true crime and, in Sanders’s case, at a certain historical moment. The 
 controversy over the exercise of the death penalty in England (prompted 
 by the execution of Derek Bentley for killing a policeman, and of Ruth 
 Ellis for shooting her lover) was still a heated one when Sanders was 
 writing. The legislative changes of the mid-1950s were less a step toward 
 abolition than they were insurance that every test would be made of the 
 deservedness of the convicted to hang. 52 Sanders’s concern was to provide 
 a profile of true wickedness to aid Her Majesty’ in deciding whom to 
 eliminate lawfully. In this way, the ethical project of the work —however 
 appalling its basis in “fact” —is not dissimilar to that of more respected 
 authorities like Fredric Wertham and Judge Curtis Bok (see Chapter 
 Three above). It matters little that Sanders’s profiles are drawn from 
 criminal history in the West generally, because that is supposedly all to 
 the good in providing a larger picture. The characteristics of a particular 
 murder and murderer might be culturally determined, but the problem of 
 murder itself is a “universal” one. As in the classic detective story, the 
 meaning of murder and its mere scenery’ should not become confused. 
 Neither the waving date palms nor the ornate interior of the first-class 
 
 122 Murder 
 
carriage is any indication of the “Who?” and “Why?” of murder. The act 
 of murder does, however, supposedly expose a truth about the banal 
 world in which the killings occur: “like a searchlight it throws a sudden 
 glare on what just before and soon afterward appears as the common gray 
 surface of life.” 53 This epiphanous quality is not found in the detective 
 mystery, but it is one of the distinctive elements of the true crime genre. 
 
 In Sanders’s vision of the Hearts Killers the portent of plot is bolstered 
 by the signifying power of the prop. Ray’s infamous toupee is a vital 
 element of the scene of murder: it is, after all, Delphine’s discovery of 
 Ray’s baldness that is the catalyst to the killings. The death of the Down- 
 ings is the place from which the backwards narrative drift begins. Thus, 
 rather than using Fay’s murder as the casting-off point in the search for 
 murder’s origin, Sanders takes the last murder first. 54 Vanity, signified by 
 the toupee, is the cause of Ray’s immediate downfall. Sanders also estab¬ 
 lishes early the status of romance in the text, now an overt parody of love. 
 Here begins to sound the cruelly ironic tone that will inform all of the 
 following accounts. While vanity is what makes a killer of Fernandez, it is 
 the love of a “silly, frustrated female” (in Brown’s phrase) that provides 
 the necessary victim. Rainelle’s blissful ignorance of the “love ... unfold¬ 
 ing like a tropic bloom in her mother’s bemused brain” marks her out as 
 the sole undeserving victim: the girl child not yet affected by the feminine 
 disorder of romance. Fernandez kills Delphine when she blurts out, in 
 horrified shock, that he’s old. Martha is written out entirely from this 
 account of Delphine’s shooting, 55 but her responsibility is inscribed as 
 more than that of a mere accessory by the way in which she comforts and 
 absolves her lover: 
 
 “Martha,” he said, a choking sob in his voice, “she saw me without the toupee, and 
 said I was old.... [Y]ou don’t think I’m old —not too old?” 
 
 . . . Her weighty arms opened and he went into them gratefully. . . . “Never 
 mind, darling boy, we’ll fix things, like we always have.” 56 
 
 Martha’s “composure” and Ray’s “hysteria” infantilizes Ray in the face of 
 the monstrous maternal figure that is Martha. She is the place within 
 which murder gestates. Before killing the child, 
 
 she patted him, walked to the door. “Just you dig a hole in the cellar, honey, and 
 make it deep enough for the both of them.” 
 
 True Crime Romance II 123 
 
... She always seemed to know what to do when something had to be done. And 
 there was always something to be done. Like now. 57 
 
 The Feminine is a figure of such monstrosity here that we find the order 
 of genesis reversed. Ray is discursively emasculated when he is told to dig 
 the grave (the womb) for her to fill. 
 
 In Sanders’s account, Martha is always in control; she always has the 
 upper hand in the partnership. She dominates, but also nurtures. Ray’s 
 fealty to Martha is too complete, forcing Sanders to explain the couple’s 
 apprehension in Michigan as the result of mistakes made in the first — and 
 much earlier —murder of Fay. 58 Martha had not, at the time of the first 
 murder, perfected her technique of dominance, nor had Ray released his 
 will to her. The Fay murder creates, for Sanders, the true character of the 
 murderers and the murder as folie a deux. 
 
 Sanders’s Martha is fast-talking, foulmouthed, smug, and doting. 59 Her 
 affectionate terms for Ray are literally or tonally diminutives: “Ray boy”; 
 “Ray darling”; “darling boy.” When she is angry, her language combines 
 the shrill quality of the shrew and the authoritative bluster of the nurse. 
 Thus, when she arrives on the doorstep of the lover who has supposedly 
 just jilted her, and is asked what in God’s name she is doing there, she 
 replies: “Can’t you see? . . . Moving in, buster.” 60 Martha’s tonal range 
 runs from the barked command to the breathy reassurance, while Ray’s is 
 typified by the wheedling tones of the flatterer and the whine of the 
 coward. 
 
 Sanders’s dialogue has the feel of the hard-boiled crime thriller, that 
 particularly American incarnation of the crime story. 61 This resonance is 
 accentuated by the propensity of the (English) writer to read the murders 
 as foreign and, therefore, as gesturing to some endemic American vio¬ 
 lence. Sanders’s fascination with the misanthropism of his characters, 
 with their seediness, is an homage to the hard-boiled genre. His text 
 lacks, however, the most important figure of that genre: the detective, 
 that cynical logician witnessing the decay of his moral and physical en¬ 
 vironment. The writer of the generic true crime tale cannot take the place 
 of the detective in such “fiction,” because he or she —outside the text — 
 cannot dispense the necessary justice. Yet the writer must try, however 
 unsuccessfully, to assume that position. His or her employment of the 
 empty forms of the hard-boiled detective story —a crime story sans 
 
 124 Murder 
 
detective — tends unwittingly to turn the irony of portent into parody and 
 black humor. Although Sanders closely follows Brown’s interpretation of 
 Martha’s murderous character, his campy noir changes the direction of 
 criticism. Instead of providing a lesson in the origin of murder (Lonely 
 Hearts clubs, naive authorities, etc.), contextual detail creates the con¬ 
 ditions for satire. Discussing the period in which Martha supposedly 
 worked in the mortuary and became an avid fan of the romance, Sanders 
 wrote: “Martha Seabrook became a person living two lives. One with the 
 dead who were finished living. The other with the living who had never 
 lived.” 62 The snappy patter of the detective mystery turns Martha’s pa¬ 
 thology into a couple of good throwaway lines. Yet those lines profess an 
 intimate knowledge — as if the writer, like the detective, was saying be¬ 
 neath his breath, “I’ve got your number, babe.” 
 
 Once Martha becomes Ray’s mistress, 63 her life takes on the “sem¬ 
 blance of a grotesque but intensely exciting charade.” 64 The love story 
 becomes th efolie a deux as black comedy. Sanders bestows upon Martha a 
 seeming delight for evil, and unplumbed depths of ressentiment. Beneath 
 the bravado of her hard-talking banter lurks a vulnerable and obsessive 
 woman, from out of whom murder originates. When Ray tells Martha 
 what his “real” work is, she is not shocked but, on the contrary, intrigued. 
 She suggests they “work together”: 
 
 She had suddenly seen an opportunity for hitting back at her own sex, for squaring 
 the overdue account for all the humiliation and misery she had suffered from the 
 years of tender girlhood. 65 
 
 Martha warns Ray that he “better let” her in on how he “operates,” 
 adding that he should not “make it sound too good” for she “could get 
 awful jealous.” Sanders reads his character straight out of the hard-boiled 
 genre, and yet the figure that mouths this warning is not the curvaceous 
 blonde who so often takes the role of th e, femme fatale in noir— she who 
 manipulates, awarding “love” while plotting murder. Martha is a gross 
 parody of that figure. The embodiment of the traditional femme fatale 
 role by “Fat Martha,” the ogress, 66 creates the black humor of this par¬ 
 ticular tale of murder. The seductive, cooing lines are read much too 
 clearly as warning rather than as invitation. Ray’s inability to see the 
 monstrous figure of his lover, so apparent to the reader, makes for a 
 parody of the modern tale of seduction that is the noir. The role of femme 
 
 True Crime Romance II 125 
 
fatale in certain hard-boiled fiction and in film noir (exemplified by Bar¬ 
 bara Stanwyck’s role in Chandler and Wilder’s Double Indemnity) marks 
 out an inversion of the nineteenth-century tale of seduction that I have 
 briefly analyzed in Chapter One above. In the modern version of the tale, 
 it is the male figure whose loss of innocence heralds death as he becomes 
 prey to the femme fatale. Martha’s decision to wreak her vengeance on the 
 women whose normality mocks her —rather than the men who have 
 shunned, abused, or failed her —is Sanders’s move away from the noir 
 The true crime writer, unlike the hard-boiled crime writer, is obliged to 
 account for Martha’s murderous career. 67 
 
 Sanders’s revisioning of the tale of murder as black comedy was a per¬ 
 suasive one. “The Incredible Lovers” provided the lead for the final and 
 most famous account of Beck’s and Fernandez’s murderous careers. The 
 film The Honeymoon Killers (and its later novelization by Paul Buck) devel¬ 
 oped Sanders’s portrait of Martha violendy defending her object of obses¬ 
 sive love. Both also elaborated upon the image of Brown’s and Sanders’s 
 “silly, oversexed, frustrated” and vulnerable older women who became 
 (through Ray) Martha’s prey. 
 
 Reclaimed by the low-budget, gritty realism of the 1960s crime movie, 
 Sanders’s unwitting homage to (or rather parody of) the hard-boiled de¬ 
 tective genre is returned to its rightful place. 68 The Honeymoon Killers is 
 black comedy of the cruelest kind and an unwittingly self-reflexive tale of 
 murder. For, although written as a romance, The Honeymoon Killers ends 
 up mocking the cultural script that demands it should be so written. 
 
 While homicide statistics in the 1960s (in contrast to statistics on prop¬ 
 erty crimes and sex crimes) appeared to be relatively stable, perceptions 
 about the violence endemic to American society had undergone a change 
 since the postwar period. Fredric Wertham, w r ho in the late 1940s warned 
 that the “individual act of murder exists against a background of vic¬ 
 timization of many people,” 69 would have been gratified by the critical 
 legal realism of the “new 7 criminologists,” 70 by the spate of commissions 
 charged with investigating the roots of crime in poverty", 71 and by the 
 doomed “Great Society” of Lyndon B. Johnson. “Crime” had acquired a 
 bevy of new 7 meanings in the America of the late 1960s. Although Rich¬ 
 ard M. Nixon cruised into the presidency on the tail of his promised law- 
 and-order legislation, this apparent rallying to the party 7 of order should 
 be view-ed in the context of the struggle by African American commu- 
 
 126 Murder 
 
nities for civil rights, the rise of the New Left and the women’s move¬ 
 ment, the expansion of civil liberties sanctioned and enshrined by the 
 rulings of Justice Earl Warren’s Supreme Court, and widespread re¬ 
 sistance to the investment of American troops in Vietnam. The concept 
 of a “criminal society” had been politicized: it no longer merely defined 
 that “underclass” so long beloved by sociologists. The politicization of 
 the term “crime” and the tendency for the “criminal” disenfranchised to 
 turn their oppressors into objects of moral scrutiny — reversing the usual 
 order of surveillance — was bound to affect fictional representations of 
 crime. 72 Such changes are certainly discernible in the final working of 
 Beck’s and Fernandez’s tale of murder, and yet it would be dangerous to 
 overemphasize the critical or revolutionary status of those changes. Re¬ 
 silient indeed are the moral strategies contained by the “backwards narra¬ 
 tive” in which the psychiatrist (or his representative) is detective. Like a 
 bad penny, the murderer comes back: not as she is, but as she is con¬ 
 structed by a discourse of murder in which she is both genesis and end. 
 
 True Crime Romance II 127 
 
6. True Crime Romance III: 
 
 The Honeymoon Killers 
 
 Some of the truth has never emerged and never will be known. Therefore both 
 the film and the novel have taken the liberty of fictionalizing probable scenes. We 
 trust these are just as likely to have taken place as anything recorded. 
 
 Paul Buck 
 
 Shirley Stoller looks like she might have been a few pounds shy of Mar¬ 
 tha’s average weight. The film version of Martha Beck is a good deal 
 grimmer, in general, than was the woman that even hostile reporters 
 called “fat, smiling Martha.” The smile of nervous reflex that was some¬ 
 times caught by press photographers throughout the trial is replaced, in 
 Stoller’s Martha, by the pout (and by a sly, assessing squint). There is also 
 a divergence between the screen version of Martha in The Honeymoon 
 Killers and the character in the novelization. That distinction is the out¬ 
 come not merely of the demands of medium, but of larger structural 
 differences between the two works. The satiric elements of the plot are 
 clearer in the film than in the novel, and yet the novel evinces a more criti¬ 
 cal awareness of the romance as part of its narrative strategy. This distance 
 between the film and the book is evidence that the novelization is a good 
 deal more than just a descriptive summary of the film. Paul Buck’s fascina¬ 
 tion with Beck and Fernandez led him to do further research in creating 
 the novel, rather than relying on the film script alone. 1 His novelization 
 changed the plot line in places and greatly enhanced Martha’s internal 
 monologues. Both the screenplay by Leonard Casde (who took over the 
 movie’s direction) and the novel by Buck show considerable investment in 
 the character of Martha, an investment that is unsurprising given the 
 development of the tale of the Hearts Killers in the true crime canon. 
 
The brevity of the film (108 min.) is compensated for by Buck’s inclu¬ 
 sion of a coda to the novel, covering the period that Beck and Fernandez 
 spent in prison. The coda and the appendix (a commentary on the neces¬ 
 sary fictions of film and novel) are both subtitled “fact.” That classifica¬ 
 tion sections off the story of Ray’s and Martha’s fate at the hands of the 
 authorities as somehow qualitatively different from the tale of murder 
 proper. Buck cannot end the novelization at the point where the film 
 leaves off, and he feels it necessary to add a commentary because the true 
 crime fiction — by the sheer impetus of narrative — has the authority of 
 “truth,” yet there is another “truth” called “fact.” After all, this is a real 
 life story, and the scenes invented are “as likely to have taken place as 
 anything recorded.” The “real” — because of the strategic nature of the 
 material upon which the “facts” rest —is ultimately unknowable. In this 
 vacuum of reliable information, the tale of murder retains its inviolability. 
 Buck is torn between his impulse to serve a “truth” and his duty to retell 
 an already well-formed story. 
 
 Buck — like those before him — is driven to explain the murderers, par¬ 
 ticularly Martha Beck. Whereas Wenzell Brown tried, however inade¬ 
 quately, to provide a structural context for the Hearts Killers’ crimes in an 
 unregulated romance industry, Buck attempts a rudimentary critique of 
 the moral climate and the gender order in postwar America in order to 
 explain the availability of Ray’s marks, Martha’s obsessional behavior, and 
 the sensationalizing reaction of the press to the murders. Despite the 
 occasional insight, Buck fails to make much of an advance on Brown’s 
 analysis. He, too, reproduces apocrypha as “fact,” and his recontextual- 
 ization unwittingly follows the mythologizing tendency of former ac¬ 
 counts. The story as told travels a familiar path and yet Buck, cogitating 
 on what actually may have happened on the night that Janet Fay was 
 murdered, makes a most surprising observation: 
 
 Since both [Ray and Martha] were able to supply fairly acceptable reasons for 
 their innocence, the following question could be asked. Although it is only a very 
 remote and unlikely possibility , could there have been a third person present ? 2 
 
 This “third person” is a phantom presence, considering that Buck has 
 just told a story throughout which a distinctly corporeal Mrs. Beck has 
 wielded hammers, drugged helpless old ladies, and drowned innocent 
 babes. Buck makes this preposterous suggestion because of his belief that 
 
 True Crime Romance III 129 
 
the “facts,” however shaky their demeanor, really can stand outside the 
 story. He himself has seen the “facts,” he has read the transcript, and yet 
 he is guilty of telling a new version of the same old story of the Hearts 
 Killers. The insertion of the “third person” is a metaphorical expression 
 of the double hind he, as narrator and supposed historian, has found 
 himself in. The “third person” is the silent (because guilty) witness to 
 what really happened , one whose presence does not actively disprove the 
 story, but represents the means by which all troublesome excess can be 
 excised. As a historian, Buck has failed adequately to explain both why 
 Martha did what she did and why she was treated as she was. But if she was 
 merely keeping (along with her love) that conventional secret of another’s 
 guilt, then much that is wrong with the tale of murder is righted. The 
 “third person” is implicated in her crime —and not her brother, mother, 
 psychiatrist, lawyer, judge, press, public, jailors, and executioner. And 
 Buck does not have to upset the established authority of this particular 
 tale of murder with the actual story of the “third person.” He can have his 
 cake and eat it too. 
 
 The Honeymoon Killers has been called by critics “documentary-like” and a 
 “dramatization” of real events. 3 The title that precedes the credits tells 
 the viewer that he or she is about to see an “incredibly shocking drama” 
 and the “most bizarre episode in the annals of American crime.” In an era 
 where lower production values (because of the losing contest with televi¬ 
 sion) characterized Hollywood, as well as independent, productions, the 
 reduction in quality was compensated for by the reduction in the costs of 
 making film and the freeing up of the set by the technical revolutions in 
 sound cameras. The 1960s saw the rise of the road movie to a genre, but 
 the increased mobility of the camera affected other, already established, 
 genres as well. Mobility was a production fact but it was also, simulta¬ 
 neously, a textual value. The 1960s crime movie, then, gravitated toward 
 the itinerant gangs that had terrorized the Midwest in the 1920s and 
 1930s: the Dillinger gang, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and her boys. 
 Moreover, the increasingly bloody depiction of various bad men’s “bad 
 ends” was also characterized by the scenes of flight, pursuit, or just plain 
 “moving on.” The car and the road are both integral parts of the modern 
 crime movie, whether of the A or B side of a production package. After 
 
 130 Murder 
 
all, the programs sold by and large to an equally mobile audience: patrons 
 of the drive-in. 
 
 Originally to be directed by Martin Scorcese (who would produce 
 some of the foremost American crime films in an era when audiences and 
 critics both came back to the movies), The Honeymoon Killers finally went 
 into production with a director whose experience lay, inscrutably enough, 
 in opera. The film’s low production values are evidenced not just by the 
 peculiar lighting, poor sound, and the claustrophobic effect of the inte¬ 
 rior sets (which actually add to the atmospheric power of the movie) but 
 by the filmmaker’s decision to relocate events onto a more contemporary, 
 mid-1960s, scene. Realism would have been a little too expensive to film 
 (the novelization returns events to the late 1940s — but with, nonetheless, 
 only a faint sense of period). The decision to update events has some 
 interesting consequences for the evolution of the tale of the Hearts 
 Killers, whose story, suddenly and inadvertently, moves closer in content 
 to the helter-skelter era of Charles Manson and the “serial killer”: a time 
 of drifters, of strangers killing strangers. Although both the film and the 
 novel restage the myths of this tale of murder, they also assume an ironic 
 distance from the America that is the killing ground of the piece. The fact 
 that the film sets the events it depicts in the 1960s only increases the 
 power of the script to dissect the culture that “gave” its victims to the 
 Hearts Killers before demanding the couple’s lives in its own act of retri¬ 
 bution. The Honeymoon Killers is very much a film of the 1960s: a B-grade 
 film made at a time when competition between the movies and television 
 was perhaps at its bitterest. And the film is remorseless in its mimicry of 
 the “ordinary,” the domestic, the suburban in American culture (that to 
 which television — according to its critics — supposedly belongs). 
 
 The black humor of the film (and, to a lesser extent, the novel) is de¬ 
 rived from its grim, monochromatic realization of the details of murder, 
 juxtaposed with a surprising attention to the idiosyncrasies of the main 
 characters, murderer and victim alike. This retelling of the tale of the 
 Hearts Killers is partly the result of the narrative accretion I have de¬ 
 scribed in the chapters above, but it also reflects a discursive shift in the 
 construction of crime in and as American culture. As the “final” version of 
 the tale, it adds new irony to the pride of place given to Beck and Fer¬ 
 nandez in the “annals of American crime.” 
 
 True Crime Romance III 131 
 
In the closing scene of The Honeymoon Killers a matron hands Martha, 
 who is waiting to be led into court, a love letter from Ray. This final 
 exhortation to romance, Ray’s desire to “shout his love for [Martha] to the 
 world,” 4 is then transformed into a private declaration of love. Casde’s 
 direction underscores the feeling that this is a private moment by having 
 the matron remove herself to the other side of the corridor while Martha 
 “hears” (in voice-over) Ray gently speak the words. By rewriting this 
 most publicized communication (featured in at least three New York 
 daily newspapers) as a promise of love, rather than its postscript , Leonard 
 Castle puts the final touches to the tale of murder as romantic fantasy. 
 The romance of the Honeymoon Killers is enacted in Martha’s obsessive 
 mind, and is played out in (rather than on) her gargantuan form. Because 
 it is a private matter — the record of an obsession — romance becomes a 
 matter of unfulfilled ideals and desperate delusion; the narrative, accord¬ 
 ingly, veers between tragedy and farce. 
 
 Twelve minutes shy of two hours long, the action in the film is neces¬ 
 sarily telescoped. The frame of the film narrows, time and its witnesses 
 are squeezed out, and Martha becomes the alpha and omega of the text. 
 The execution as event disappears from the text, but its meaning retains a 
 shadowy presence. The opening scene shows Martha entering a smoke- 
 filled room, the site of an accidental chemical explosion. Smoke creeps 
 beneath the ceiling as Martha chastises the nurse and male orderly who 
 have, obviously, been using the room for a sexual liaison. “Together . . . 
 you’re just as bad as ammonia and chlorine!” Martha tells them. This 
 scene presages a more fatal mix than ammonia and chlorine in the sup- 
 posed folie a deux of Ray and Martha. 5 
 
 The execution figures in this way, tangentially, not merely because the 
 brevity of the film denies it a place. When Buck reinserts the execution in 
 the coda, it is briefly described; he spends more time on the prison days. 
 Pointedly, he writes: “The facts in the coda refrain from comment, as 
 here I do not wish to condone the methods by which the two killers were 
 brought to justice.” Elsewhere, discussing the irregular extradition of the 
 couple from Michigan to New York, he opines that “Ray and Martha 
 were flown to New York to be executed. (The trial was regarded as a 
 subsidiary.)” 6 While his disapproval of 1950s due process is overt, the 
 film —owing, at least in part, to its having “updated” the crimes —avoids 
 the judicial and punitive issues. We leave Martha as she is about to go to 
 
 132 Murder 
 
her first day in court, although the ending could have been served just as 
 well had she read the letter in the death house. 
 
 This disavowal of the fate of the couple is a sign of the times that 
 produced both texts. The 68 percent of people who apparently favored 
 the death penalty in 1953 had become just 51 percent by i960. 7 By 1970 
 there would be a five-year functional moratorium on executions through¬ 
 out the United States. The fascination with killing evinced by the rapa¬ 
 ciously violent crime movie of the 1960s is therefore complicated by a 
 tendency toward moral self-searching. The violence of social retribution 
 is examined in such diverse texts as In Cold Blood , Bonnie and Clyde , To Kill a 
 Mockingbird , and Town without Pity (to name but a few). This impulse to 
 eulogize and critique was not restricted to the crime genre but surfaced, 
 to varying degrees, in the modern Western and in the war film. The 
 relative liberalism of the times, exemplified by the moratorium on execu¬ 
 tions, may have given rise to a nostalgia for the kind of rapacious violence 
 that supposedly warranted summary or formal execution (the denoue¬ 
 ment of Bonnie and Clyde springs to mind here). Even if “death stood 
 condemned” statutorily speaking, the specular nature of violent death 
 was on the up and up. 
 
 Fragments of Fact 
 
 The film The Honeymoon Killers has a different kind of explanatory power 
 from that of all the previous written accounts. The search for origins 
 necessarily works along synchronic rather than diachronic lines (if we 
 except the movement of “screen time” in the film). And yet Castle shows 
 a surprising commitment to documenting the evidence of the murder of 
 Fay and (to a lesser extent) the Downings. The displacement of the kill¬ 
 ings historically is made up for in part by Castle’s inclusion of these 
 traceries of fact — although perhaps not enough to warrant calling the 
 film a “docudrama.” Such ephemeral traces of the murders’ origins might 
 have been lost on an audience ignorant about the accounts of a case tried 
 twenty years before. Tony Lo Bianco’s Ray has a crescent-shaped scar on 
 his forehead, a relic of the shipboard accident that had supposedly injured 
 Ray’s brain. We see this clearly but can impute no history to it. The scar is 
 just there — Ray does not even rub his forehead in moments of stress or 
 
 True Crime Romance III 133 
 
anger to draw our attention to it. In other words, the scar exists not for 
 the benefit of the audience, butyor the record. There are other references 
 to the “real story” of the murderers: a disc of tunes from the South Sea 
 islands is dragged out the night of Ray’s and Martha’s first date. Ray was 
 born in Hawaii, after all, although from the script we know him only as a 
 Spaniard. Later in the film the couple are shown entering the Kenmore 
 Hotel in Manhattan, which was, indeed, the place where they stayed 
 while Ray first wooed Janet Fay . 8 
 
 Film, like any other medium, is by nature intertextual. Any work could 
 be expected to carry its freight of more or less decipherable references to 
 other texts, and yet it is interesting to examine what, for The Honeymoon 
 Killers, are the points of reference. We are fed glimpses of past “real lives”: 
 marks on the body, places visited. This fidelity to the “real” story is 
 integral to the true crime text, regardless of whether or not it plays to an 
 audience of fans whose heads are crammed with the trivia of famous 
 killings. Even if Castle did not think his audience would pick up such 
 references, he perhaps needed to insert them: from those scattered relics 
 of fact comes the authority of the tale. These few things are at least 
 tangible, while all else must remain ineffable: “events as likely to have 
 taken place as anything recorded.” The narrative authority of the tale of 
 murder is derived from practically everything but the “facts” of the case. 
 And yet that excess depends upon such disparate threads of evidence: the 
 hammer, the hotel room, the Lonely Hearts column, Ray’s scarred head. 
 
 In both the film and novelization of The Honeymoon Killers, traces of the 
 “real” dialogue between the murderers, and betw een the couple and their 
 victims, appear. The various accounts of the Fay murder that came out 
 at the trial —a most detailed and probing inquisition, establishing the 
 killers’ reputations —reappear scattered throughout the entire murder¬ 
 ous career of Beck and Fernandez as portrayed in the film. Thus, one of 
 the couple’s earlier alleged victims mouths many of the lines Martha 
 attributed to Janet Fay. Alyrtle Young, who dies from an overdose on a 
 Greyhound bus en route to Arkansas, is forced into her fatal drug stupor 
 by Martha, w r ho resents the older women’s repeated importunings of Ray 
 for sex. She w-atches through the door while Myrtle pulls one breast from 
 out of her nightdress, asking Ray whether he’d “like some sugar.” This 
 scene is but one of several that utilize Martha’s controversial testimony of 
 the night of the Fay murder, when Martha saw r , supposedly, Janet Fay put 
 
 134 Murder 
 
a “shrivelled old breast” to Ray’s mouth, cooing “Don’t oo want some 
 sugar, honeychile ?” 9 This moment, and the conversation between Myrtle 
 and Martha when the former is trying to establish whether Ray can 
 “screw or not,” deploys a discredited “truth ” 10 to establish the integrity 
 of the murderer’s character and, therefore, the authority of the tale of 
 murder. 
 
 Authority in the tale of murder comes from the deployment of 
 “facts” — fragments of the “true” story —as narrative building blocks. 
 Thus a great deal is attached to those fragments of the trial record that do 
 make it into the film. The redeployed dialogue tells us about the speakers 
 and their relationship to one another. If one of the victims in the film 
 mouths words attributed to one of the actual victims, the figure of the 
 victim is established: the kind of woman who dies. The women who die and 
 the woman who kills in The Honeymoon Killers are almost interchangeable. 
 It is this likeness that creates a self-critical dimension in the film, al¬ 
 though it is never able to rise above irony to an actual critique of the 
 American romantic ideal. 
 
 The filmmaker’s decision to replace Martha’s children in the story with 
 a partly senile mother is a significant one. The scene of desertion is 
 underscored when it becomes one of filial failure. Yet the register of that 
 betrayal —and its meaning —is altered. Because of her vulnerability and 
 her dependence, Martha’s aged mother is an adequate stand-in for the 
 figure of the deserted children. And yet there is an element of shrewish¬ 
 ness in the mother. She, unlike the children, cannot be entirely innocent. 
 The slippage between murderer and victim is accentuated by the function 
 of Martha’s mother in the text. As her daughter abandons her into care, 
 heading for New York and her fake marriage to Fernandez, the elderly 
 Mrs. Beck yells: 
 
 You’re digging my grave because you’re killing me by leaving me here. . . . God 
 damn you! God damn you! I hope you end up like this. I hope someone does this 
 to you! 
 
 This “curse” demonstrates several of the workings of portent (as irony) in 
 the film. The solitary tear that tracks the curve of Martha’s cheek as she 
 walks away beneath her mother’s window demonstrates that she feels 
 guilt and sorrow, but she cannot avert the course of her love. And, indeed, 
 someone does “do this” to her: she is finally betrayed by Fernandez’s 
 
 True Crime Romance III 135 
 
willingness to make a joke of her love by lying to her about his sexual 
 activity. “One more to fleece. One more to fuck, one more to kill, kill, 
 kill,” Martha moans in one of the final scenes. 11 Discursively, Martha’s 
 mother is the couple’s first victim. She is charmed by Ray when her 
 daughter first meets her beau. “The Latin from Manhattan,” the elderly 
 Mrs. Beck simpers. She even offers to dance with the younger man. 
 
 Just prior to the actual murder of Fay, Ray told Martha to “keep that 
 woman quiet, no matter how it is.” 12 Choosing to follow instead the 
 outline of Martha Beck’s revised statement (see Appendix) the essential 
 piece of dialogue during Fay’s killing in the film is Ray’s whisper to Mar¬ 
 tha as he refuses the hammer: “If you love me you’ll do it.” 13 In two other 
 vital sequences in the film —one the metaphorical murder of Martha’s 
 mother, the other the literal killing of the Downings —the character of 
 Ray echoes the missing line. He tells Martha over the phone that she 
 cannot even think of bringing her mother with her to New York. “Get rid 
 of her ... choke her... I don’t care what the hell you do with her, but you 
 can’t bring her up here!” he yells. Later, Ray is similarly short about the 
 disposal of little Rainelle Downing. When Martha is wondering what to 
 do with the child, he tells her to “put a pillow' over her face . . . smother 
 her ... I don’t care w'hat you do as long as you get rid of her!” This 
 reliance on the resonance of both of the murderers’ actual testimony (the 
 two early statements wdiich formed the basis of the prosecution’s case) 
 tends to make the responsibility for the killings more clearly shared. And 
 yet, the ubiquity of Ray’s dismissal of the victims into his lover’s hands for 
 disposal, his challenge that Martha do that vital “something,” describes 
 her position as besotted supplicant. Like the other women in the film, 
 only more so, Martha w'ants to please Ray. In The Honeymoon Killers the 
 women are virtually of a kind in their outrageousness, their crassness, 
 their foolishness, and their naive vulnerability. This flattening of the 
 differences between killer and killed indicates the importance, in this text 
 at least, of the “Who?” in murder, as much as the “Why?” 
 
 Disposable Dames 
 
 Wenzell Brown’s analysis of the evils of the romance industry and his 
 derisive asides about the “silly and oversexed” women w'ho populate the 
 
 136 Murder 
 
Lonely Hearts clubs are developed to interesting effect in the film. Re¬ 
 gardless of whether they die or not, the spinsters whom Ray cons are 
 marked for death in a culture within which they have become, quite 
 simply, redundant. That redundancy is symbolized in the text by the 
 complete mystification of these women by fashion. Janet Fay, who was in 
 real life a dressmaker, becomes, in the film, a maker of hats. Janet’s hats 
 are the most ludicrous contraptions. She is energetically off the mark in 
 her fashion sense, a failure observed by the film’s audience, who laugh 
 with the murderers as they bluff her along, full of praise for her talent. 14 
 With such talent Janet could just “rake in the money.” It is by holding out 
 the promise of helping her invest in a hat shop that Martha and Ray are 
 able to convince Janet to withdraw her life’s savings. Just as she believes 
 she is still marriageable, Janet also thinks she is a maker of fine and 
 fashionable hats. Yet she, and her handiwork, are both a far cry from 
 “marketable.” 
 
 The first of Ray’s victims, Doris Acker, also had a penchant for unfortu¬ 
 nate hats; in one scene she wears a huge, feathery assembly. But her 
 redundancy in the consumer culture of desire is signaled by quite another 
 form of naivete. Like the widow Downing later in the film, Doris is 
 enthusiastic in her patriotism. While soaking in the bath, preparatory to a 
 good scrub, she sings “America the Beautiful.” With Doris conveniently 
 out of the way, Ray and Martha rifle through her suitcase and, accom¬ 
 panied by a boisterous chorus of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” we see 
 Ray counting a wad of the stolen cash. As Doris launches into the follow¬ 
 ing verses, we see the shadows of Martha and Ray making love in the next 
 room. Doris’s old-style patriotic enthusiasm is juxtaposed with a more 
 cynical view of the American dream: the pursuit of happiness in the form 
 of money and sex. 
 
 Ray and Martha are certainly playing the market, the rhythm of their 
 lives derived from the demands both of the product they’re exploiting 
 and its economic circuit. At the start of the film, Ray hurries away from 
 Martha (who has just lent him $100) with the excuse that he must return 
 to New York for the working week’s start of banking hours. Later, the 
 couple dawdle through a car trip, only to arrive in Queens after the banks 
 have closed. Although the crimes have been updated to the 1960s, the 
 economic world in which they occur is almost an anachronism: an Amer¬ 
 ica in which cash counts for a great deal, where issuing banks must en- 
 
 True Crime Romance III 137 
 
dorse their checks, and where a closed bank or the wrong branch means 
 an unclinchable deal. The pace of the film, and the lives it portrays, are set 
 by cash counted, bank hours, and the constant traveling from town to 
 town to cash checks at regional banks. Money —rather than being an 
 intangible, mobile, and disposable standard —carries with it a sense of 
 place and time. Both the crime and the victims are anachronisms in the 
 increased mobility of a changed postwar America. 
 
 Ray and Martha almost transcend the inertia of their victims by extort¬ 
 ing profit from their very redundancy. The method of their criminal 
 career reveals a cynical reading of the simpler values they mimic and 
 exploit. Thus, Ray and Martha fall in happily with Delphine Downing’s 
 patriotic lessons, her celebration of Lincoln’s birthday, and her constant 
 commemoration of the lesser-known anniversaries of American history. 
 But Ray’s knowledge of what America is, and what it means, is more 
 idiosyncratic. Martha complains, “If we stay here much longer she’ll have 
 me sewing flags like Betsy Ross!” Ray is baffled. “Who's Betsy Ross?” he 
 asks. He understands perfecdy the need for a woman getting on in years 
 to find a second husband, or to wrap an illegitimate pregnancy in respect¬ 
 ability. He understands the continued trustingness of women who put 
 their money into the hands of their husbands. The good old value system 
 of Christian Middle America is what allows Fernandez the profit of his 
 sport. The Honeymoon Killers describes one set of American values falling 
 prey to another, more cynical version. 
 
 And yet, the newly acquired value system is not entirely different. The 
 connection between the mawkishly innocent world of the spinsters and 
 widows and that of their exploiters is Martha herself. I have been careful 
 above to stress the preeminence, in the film, of Fernandez’s direction of 
 the crime: his cynicism is more or less complete and, accordingly, his 
 profit from the crimes is greater. Even in his failed endeavor to swindle 
 Evelyn Long —the only woman in the film represented as “normal” — 
 Ray profits from what obviously are enjoyable sexual relations with the 
 young widow. Because Evelyn Long is able to step out of the value system 
 that decrees she should not have sex with a man to whom she is not 
 married (and if she does, she ought to feel guilty about it) it is Martha who 
 suffers. Throughout the film it is Martha, as much as any of the other of 
 Fernandez’s victims, who clings to a notion of fidelity and true love. 
 Martha is just another version of the monstrously ridiculous w r oman w ho 
 
 138 Murder 
 
has become redundant to the American dream of romance as it is, day by 
 day, so halfheartedly lived. In its willingness to lampoon such women, the 
 film is stating a de facto belief in the system that passes them over, that so 
 rigidly classifies attractiveness and sociability. 
 
 Buck wrote in his coda that each of Fernandez’s victims “had a certain 
 willingness to be led to her fate.” This malleability came from “their 
 refusal to come to terms with their unattractiveness and their sexual 
 dwindlings.” Romance with Ray, therefore, was a means to sustain a 
 delusion. Martha, no less than the paramours fleeced by her lover, was 
 bound to accept the conditions of a romance that she has not earned. 
 Such a deal could be read as cynical, but Buck turns away from the 
 concept of a conscious acceptance by these unwanted women of the un¬ 
 favorable terms of the romantic contract. Martha Beck had “come to 
 terms” with the fact that she “could never have appeared less than ugly.” 
 She had enveloped herself “in a protective dream world where everything 
 was perfect for her” — where she invented a war hero husband and the 
 vital social life that, in reality, she lacked. Buck wrote regretfully of the 
 ungenerous court and jury that failed to recognize “that Martha’s life was 
 a complete fusion of truth and fantasy.” 15 The strategic nature of “cop¬ 
 ing” becomes, in Martha’s case, the pathology of delusion. “Many women 
 must live in the fantasies of romance stories,” but Martha was not content 
 with such vicarious living. The point at which she crossed over from 
 exigency to madness was when she started to manufacture the romantic 
 script herself. Martha “managed to convince not only friends but business 
 acquaintances” of the existence of her hero husband, Joe Carmen, father 
 to her first child. 16 Women, therefore, can be expected to hold onto the 
 unreal hopes peddled to them by romance culture, and to make do with 
 their lot in whatever way they can; but to exploit the script for their own 
 purposes is going too far. However, it is not quite clear how Martha is 
 different from those other women who embroider the nature of their 
 romance with Ray for friends and relatives. 17 That she is driven to murder 
 cannot be the difference, because something must precede the murder to 
 explain it. Once again, the old conundrum of the tale of murder’s origin 
 appears. 
 
 When she is peremptorily dismissed from the hospital where she is 
 matron, we see Shirley Stoller’s Martha have it out with the superinten¬ 
 dent. In a fury, she tells him: “I’m not so sure Hitler wasn’t right about 
 
 True Crime Romance III 139 
 
you people.” Martha’s anti-Semitism is possibly meant to gesture toward 
 her Southern parochialism, but it also shows the kind of temperament 
 that will accept any ammunition into its large armory of contempt. Mar¬ 
 tha’s insult should be read in the visual context of the scene: behind her on 
 the office wall is a poster of a pretty nurse, smiling, with a finger to her 
 lips. The legend beneath reads, “Shhhhh!” Martha is not the sort whose 
 face will ever don an educational poster; not the kind of woman upon 
 whom the controlling charm of the coquette will sit well. In a culture that 
 enforces propriety most particularly upon those within it who would give 
 anything for the opportunities the desirable get, Martha’s impropriety is 
 pure ressentiment. 
 
 Marie Belloc Lowndes’s fascination with the “Why?” of murder seems a 
 little incurious. In the developed tale of the Hearts Killers in the true 
 crime canon, the “Who?” and the “Why?” of murder become figuratively 
 inseparable. The structure of portent in the tale of murder works in such 
 a way as to prefigure an ending that is, simultaneously, the beginning of 
 the tale. The ironic mode functions wholly upon the foregrounding of 
 the outcome. Portent, in the tale of murder, is a form of trickery. For the 
 character of the murderer is not merely an actor in the narrative: the 
 narrative figure becomes the very event of murder itself. Th efolie a deux 
 makes a single chemistry of two distinct actors in the murderous couple: 
 one completes, rather than compliments, the other. In the development of 
 the tale of the Hearts Killers, the importance of the narrative structure of 
 xhefolie a deux was such that it was the necessary link between the con¬ 
 temporary versions of the crimes, read by onlookers as a parodic ro¬ 
 mance, and the later narratives of those English commentators who em¬ 
 braced the murders as both exemplary American crimes and universal 
 evidence of romantic excess. The transmutation of the tale of the Hearts 
 Killers into satiric form was a consequence of these earlier developments, 
 the legacy of the folie a deux, and a cultural shift in narrative authority 
 generally. The continuing tendency of the tale of murder to focus on the 
 murderers and to adopt him/her as subject seems to beget by the 1960s a 
 less authoritative script than that spoken by Wertham’s Irvin, or the 
 lavyer who speaks for Roger in Star Wormwood. The uncertainty and self¬ 
 reflexive nature of the new script does not exert itself, however, as fully 
 formed critique but as irony, as parody, as a joke. Martha, as subject, 
 
 140 Murder 
 
remains the surface beneath which the mystery of murder waits, barely 
 contained in even her gargantuan form. The Hearts Killers were the 
 perfect subjects for film because so much of their story is about veneer, 
 about surface: from the supposedly expanding girth of Martha, to Ray’s 
 toupee, to the layer of concrete that would not harden over the Down- 
 ings’ graves. Where the search for murder’s origin tracks through the 
 murderer’s psyche even much of that which is psychological is rendered 
 visible (and intelligible to the layperson) by its register upon the body of 
 the murderer. The visceral text is a tale of murder told on the body. 
 
 True Crime Romance III 141 
 

 
Kri II 
 
 TU Kl(U <I 
 
 It’s a funny old world .. . 
 
 and a man’s lucky if he gets out of it alive. 
 
 W C. Fields 
 
7- Killing Grounds 
 
 No one made vows, or lit candles: it was, eventually, just another tv news spot 
 concerning the trials of a friendly but disastrously underdeveloped area. 
 
 James Baldwin (on the Atlanta Child Killings) 
 
 I went mourning without the sun: I stood up, 
 and I cried in the congregation. 
 
 I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. 
 
 My skin is black upon me, 
 
 and my bones are burned with heat. 
 
 My harp also is turned to mourning, 
 
 and my organ into the voice of them that weep. 
 
 Job 30:28-31 
 
 The politicization of the term “crime” in the 1960s shifted certain narra¬ 
 tives of murder onto a more critical territory, a territory for which the 
 sites of greatest contest would be race and gender. James Baldwin, Kate 
 Millett and Arm Imbrie explore in different ways that contested ground, 
 and their critical discourses on murder challenge, with varying results, 
 the generic conventions of the tale of murder. These writers seek to place 
 the killed at the center of their narratives: those to whom, inevitably, all 
 answerable questions must be directed, despite the fact that they are deaf, 
 dumb, irreconcilably gone. In these texts the dead are listened to and 
 spoken to, and the reader takes up a place beside them — not vicariously, 
 as in the generic tale, where one is positioned by the murderer, but shar¬ 
 ing the fragility of those routinely made vulnerable, the chosen victims. 
 
 In the recent bumper crop of American miniseries based on actual 
 murders, the banal and the outrageous have been chosen to represent 
 American violence. Serial killers and women convicted of conspiracy to 
 
commit murder seem particularly in vogue, although television dramas 
 with a social conscience might go so far as to explore the prosaics of 
 murder in an “unequal” society. Many cases of domestic homicide have 
 recently made it to the small screen, crimes made infamous by the use of 
 the battered women’s syndrome as a defense. This, says the apostolic 
 voice of prime-time television, is the “problem” of murder in America. 
 This , it must also admit, is entertainment. 
 
 Murder as television drama deals with typicality and atypicality, with 
 everyday violence and “monstrous” cruelty. Serial killers account for very 
 few of the victims of murder per capita in the United States, but they 
 make popular representational fare. The curiosity 7 evinced by the public 
 about this supposedly new category of murderer has itself made the 
 “psycho” or “serial” killer the bogeyman of murder. Women who kill are, 
 in any and all cases, statistically unrepresentative of murder in America. 1 
 Popular culture’s fetishization of the woman murderer —whether as a 
 psychotic killer, 2 a woman pushed too far by male violence, or a plotting 
 neurotic —ironically indicates the relative safety of society 7 from female 
 violence. The woman murderer is both alterior and exotic. 3 
 
 As distinct from its representations in popular culture, a sociological 
 analysis of murder gives rise to a different image of American violence. 
 Like most “objective” empirical evidence, homicide statistics claim to 
 make an accurate diagnosis of the ailing constitution of the American 
 polity. The rate of homicide in America is many times that of its Euro¬ 
 pean counterparts: io per 100,000 inhabitants, rather than the 1.1 per 
 100,000 in England. 4 People usually are killed by intimates or acquain¬ 
 tances, although American statistics indicate an increasing rate of killings 
 by strangers in the United States. 5 Homicide rates in urban and rural 
 areas are not necessarily higher and lower, respectively, but there is a 
 higher rate overall in the southern states. 6 A comprehensive study made in 
 the 1960s on homicide as a cause of death found that people betw een the 
 ages of twenty-five and forty-four w r ere the most likely both to die by 
 violence and to kill. Among that vulnerable group, “blacks and Chicanos” 
 w 7 ere identified as ten times more likely to die as victims of homicide. 
 “Homicide,” the study concluded vaguely, “remains a leading cause of 
 death in certain segments of the population.” 7 More than twenty-five 
 years later, the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, 
 brought that statement back into stark focus. In the last years of Ronald 
 
 146 Murder 
 
Reagan’s presidency, the homicide rate among young African American 
 men had risen in i in i,ooo. 8 It now stands at io per 1,000. Nowadays 
 “one out of every 21 black men can expect to be murdered. This is a death 
 rate double that of American servicemen during the war [WWII].” 9 In 
 1992 46,000 African Americans between the ages of fifteen and twenty- 
 four died by homicide. In the same period and age group, the figure for 
 whites was 32,000. Given that African Americans represent only 12.5 
 percent of the total population, 46,000 represents a grossly dispropor¬ 
 tionate rate. 10 A black male of any age is seven times more likely than his 
 white peer to die as a victim of homicide. 11 Indeed, homicide has become 
 the major cause of death among African American male youth. 12 
 
 The reality of American murder so frequently taken from such statistics 
 as these can be both reactionary and paranoid. White political pundits 
 who deploy the terms “race” and “ethnicity” as if they themselves had 
 none look at the scourge of “street crime” and behold a vast sea of poor 
 black and nonwhite faces. The very concept of “street crime” takes its 
 structural sense from the social and cultural category of the “under¬ 
 class” — a grouping that differentiates its inhabitants by their alterity alone 
 and, singularly, by their relative poverty. The underclass as other has no 
 color in its oven theorization, but it is definitely nonwhite if white is taken 
 to mean the affluent, orderly, middle-class male that is the unproblemat- 
 ized citizen upon whose existence the rule of law is founded. In such a con¬ 
 text, those “shocking” homicide rates take on the dimensions of an epi¬ 
 demic: something carried by and among the Third World poor among us; 
 something that has always, since time immemorial, afflicted the poor. That 
 is just the way it is. Thus James Baldwin’s recollection of a traditional affir¬ 
 mation of black faith: “I ain’t got to do nothing but stay black, and die!” 
 translates, without its air of resignation, to the context of a racist America 
 that slaughters, with mind-numbing regularity, its black children. 13 
 
 The high rate of murder by and of young African American men seems 
 to be treated by the institutions of American justice as historically contin¬ 
 uous with that apocryphal definition of murder from the “Old” South: “If 
 a nigger kills a white, that’s murder; if a white kills a nigger that’s justifi¬ 
 able homicide; if a nigger kills another nigger that's just one less nigger." 
 Judicial and correctional systems work far below the standard of the 
 constitutional ideal that has been devised and revised throughout the 
 history of the Republic, and sanctioned or extended with varying degrees 
 
 Killing Grounds 147 
 
of success by the U.S. Supreme Court. This failure of the functional 
 realities of “equal justice” and equal protection before the law is elo¬ 
 quently illustrated by the fate recently of antidiscrimination and affirma¬ 
 tive action legislation before the Court. Holding to its concept of liberal 
 individualism, and in a return to strict formalism in its legal reasoning, 
 the Court has lately rendered majority decisions that refuse to engage 
 with the problem of institutionalized racism. 14 No longer does “equality 
 of opportunity” imply the need for remedial policy. “Equality of opportu¬ 
 nity” increasingly registers as a thing best attained by “race neutrality” — 
 by “strict scrutiny” and suspicion of all racial classification, whatever its 
 purpose. Even in areas of the judicial system where overwhelming evi¬ 
 dence has indicated an unacceptable degree of arbitrariness and racial 
 bias, such inequality has been dismissed as representing the predictable 
 anomalies of an imperfect system. 
 
 In 1986, George McCleskey, a prisoner on death row in Georgia, peti¬ 
 tioned the U.S. Supreme Court with a claim that the Georgia capital 
 statutes were “applied in a racially discriminatory fashion.” 15 In support 
 of his claim, McCleskey’s lawyers laid before the Court extensive research 
 indicating that defendants charged with killing white persons were ten 
 times more likely than those charged with killing nonwhites to get the 
 death sentence. 16 Although the race of the victim was the most significant 
 indicator of the likelihood of a capital indictment, the race of the defen¬ 
 dant was also a determinant. 17 The Court was not impressed by the claim 
 that Georgia had violated the Fourteenth Amendment (equal protec¬ 
 tion), but did give some weight to the Eighth Amendment violation (cruel 
 and unusual punishment). By placing on McCleskey the burden that he 
 must prove that he, as an individual, had been discriminated against, the 
 Court turned away from the concept of social, or collective, injury to that 
 of individual disability. 18 The law is an ass, it would seem. Or so the 
 present state of American jurisprudence regarding “equal protection” 
 would indicate. Thus, although the Fourteenth Amendment specifically 
 prohibits “punishments based on arbitrary or unreasonable classifications 
 such as race or color,” Florida’s state supreme court, upheld by the U.S. 
 Supreme Court, found constitutional a 
 
 statute punishing adultery and fornication [that imposes] a different punishment 
 when committed by a black and a white person from that where the offenders are of the 
 
 148 Murder 
 
same race . . . since whatever discrimination there may be in the punishment 
 prescribed is directed against the offense designated and not against a person of 
 any particular color or race . . . since the punishment of each offending person, 
 whether white or black, is the same. 19 
 
 That ability of the law to hold as distinct the offense and its offenders is 
 eloquent testimony to the law’s obliviousness to history, to context, and — 
 here I paraphrase — to the ever -present effects of past discrimination. By 
 refusing to take account of McCleskey’s Fourteenth Amendment claim, 
 the majority decision emptied the politics out of the term “discrimi¬ 
 nation” — leaving it the empty vessel it has, perhaps, always been. 
 
 While a discussion of the arbitrariness of the death penalty might seem 
 to be something of a side issue, it is not. The decay of ethical reasoning 
 evident in the Supreme Court’s refusal to weigh historical evidence and 
 sociological data is, in and of itself, a grim trend. Its ultimate result is a 
 strengthening of the position of the white male subject as citizen and legal 
 standard. The failure of McCleskey’s argument —a failure fatal to the 
 claimant —is proof that the judicial machine, like the culture that runs it, 
 does not care if there is “one less nigger.” 20 The tenacity of racism comes 
 from its institutional structure, and the secure foundations of that struc¬ 
 ture in a discourse of alterity. The history of American racism is not a 
 history of conspiracy. It is the history of ordinary people, living ordinary, 
 even “patriotic,” lives: people who are white or act white and who live in a 
 world where that is just the way it is. These are “The People” that the U.S. 
 Constitution was designed to protect. Yet there are those who are prac¬ 
 tically other to that constitution, those who have been struggling to get 
 into history or, even harder, struggling to make that history unrecogniz¬ 
 able. America’s “occupied country,” that “friendly but disastrously under¬ 
 developed area” Baldwin wrote so bitterly of, 21 is Harlem, Watts, Cren¬ 
 shaw Heights, or —and perhaps even particularly — the Adanta of the 
 child murders. 
 
 On the Seriality of the “Adanta Killings” 
 
 James Baldwin visited Adanta in early 1982 to cover the trial of Wayne 
 Williams, who had been indicted for the final two of the twenty-eight 
 
 Killing Grounds 149 
 
murders popularly known as the “Atlanta Child Killings.” Like the En¬ 
 glish writer Martin Amis, who was in Adanta just before Williams’s arrest, 
 Baldwin was unsetded by the willingness of the prosecutors and news 
 media to attach the twenty-eight deaths to one killer, making them 
 thereby seem somehow extraordinary. “The killings in Atlanta” assumed 
 the status not of category but of tide: an honorific term that followed 
 Williams’s name as if he could explain it, and it him. Both Amis and 
 Baldwin knew that the killing or disappearance of poor, black children in 
 American cities (or, indeed, rural areas) was neither unusual nor generally 
 remarked upon by the authorities: 22 
 
 [T]he missing, menaced, murdered children were menaced by color and locality: 
 they were — visibly — Black, which in this republic, is a kind of doom, and actually 
 poor —which condition elicits from the land of opportunity ... a judgment as 
 merciless as it is defensive. 23 
 
 What made these black children so suddenly precious to the authorities 
 was the “pattern” discerned in the deaths as bodies turned up in rivers, by 
 roadsides, in vacant lots. This “pattern” was a dubious sort of connection 
 for Baldwin, who could see little in common between the murders. The 
 children were killed in different ways, their bodies found in different 
 places, and they w'ere not all boys (two girls died); they were not even all 
 children. The two murders for which Williams was indicted were of 
 “grown men,” although Baldwin was told that these two were “perceived 
 as children” because they were “retarded.” 24 For Baldwin, what were 
 called the Atlanta Child Killings and assigned a murderer to author them 
 had, in the actual crimes, no intelligible unity. 25 He did not comment, 
 as did Amis, on the compressed time frame of the disappearances, or 
 on their “alarming” frequency. 26 Unlike Amis, who deployed the concept 
 of the “pattern” even after he’d wondered at the lie at the heart of the 
 term Atlanta Child Killings, Baldwin could not discern in the relation 
 of the murders to one another (or even to their supposed author) this 
 famous and convenient “pattern.” In a masterful critique of the catch-22 
 logic of prosecutorial reasoning, Baldwin argued that the concept of the 
 “pattern” allowed the district attorney to charge the defendant with the 
 very crimes that did not fit the pattern, and to w r rap up the other twenty- 
 six, less anomalous, murders. The accused provided the lens through 
 which a “pattern” could be discerned in court; a link w r as established that 
 
 150 Murder 
 
would implicate Williams in the other murders. Under such close scru¬ 
 tiny, the behavior of the defendant could give credence to any “pattern”: 
 
 He may have been observed, standing on a street corner, or in an alleyway, or his 
 kitchen or someone else s kitchen, or a bar, or a toilet, talking to a boy or a girl or a 
 man or a cat or a woman or your wife or his sister or himself: there is nothing that 
 won’t, under pressure, establish a “pattern, ” and, once one begins looking for a “pattern, ” 
 this “pattern ” will prove anythingyou want it to prove. 2 ’’ 
 
 Baldwin’s comment could just as well refer to the whole portentous struc¬ 
 ture of the tale of murder. For Baldwin there is a “pattern,” but it is not to 
 be found in the topology of the crimes. What “pattern” there is comes 
 from the place and time of the murders: the city of Atlanta, the State of 
 Georgia, the United States of America: 
 
 The cowardice of this time and place —this era —is nowhere more clearly re¬ 
 vealed than in the perpetual attempt to make the public and social disaster the 
 result, or the issue, of a single demented creature or, perhaps, half a dozen such 
 creatures. 28 
 
 An “era” is never merely a period. The term contains the resonance of 
 Fernand Braudel’s mentalite and Michel Foucault’s episteme. The time and 
 the place cannot be separated. The time of murder and the place of murder 
 is a city (or many cities: Washington or New York or Baltimore would do) 
 with a large and ghettoized African American and/or nonwhite popula¬ 
 tion beginning to be administered by blacks and people of color. The city, 
 containing a “valuable chunk of real estate” in the ghetto that the state 
 will eventually seek to reclaim, is thereby given over to the care of its 
 interim occupants. “Thus . . . whatever happens in the city becomes the 
 responsibility of those corralled there.” 29 In Atlanta in 1982 the place is 
 the time in a very real sense. Atlanta cannot quite abandon its past and its 
 identity as that exemplary city of the reconstructed South. Its literal 
 transfiguration in the 1860s had only partly, and much more lately, been 
 followed by a remaking of race relations there — forcefully integrated in 
 the 1960s and boasting a majority-black administration since the 1970s. 
 Knowledge of those gains in the African American community is marred 
 by an easily awakened sense of racial threat. 30 
 
 The murderer is black, the murdered are black, the police commis¬ 
 sioner and the mayor and the trial judge are black. 31 The community that 
 
 Killing Grounds 151 
 
organized to draw attention to the murders was itself black. Indeed, the 
 fbi turned up —a dubious kind of cavalry —only after the disappearance 
 of the thirteenth victim, who was from out of state. It is not necessary for 
 Baldwin to preface this entrance with the bureau’s own rationale for it: 
 jurisdiction made the murders their business. Thirteen-year-old Clifford 
 Jones was not, like the previous victims, one of the Atlanta poor. He was 
 from out of town, out of state and, quite simply, not out of mind to the 
 authorities as the other lost children had been. The crossing of jurisdic¬ 
 tional boundaries defines the locus of power, and the interests of the 
 powerful. In Baldwin’s analysis, “jurisdiction” is not an empty legal term 
 but is the border sign of a territory where citizenship is still restricted. 
 
 It is unlikely that a fan of true crime, educated in reading an unself- 
 critical genre, would find intelligible The Evidence of Things Not Seen. 
 Why is a book that should be about Wayne Williams, the murderer, and 
 what happened to his victims, in fact a polemic against endemic racism? 
 What kind of reporting is this? After all, Baldwin admits that he attended 
 only one week of the trial, and that he could not speak directly about the 
 murders to some of those most intimately affected by them. 32 His inves¬ 
 tigation of the actual legal strategy in the prosecution of Williams is 
 musing rather than analytically critical. And yet it is this strategy, these 
 “failures” on the part of the reporter, that establish his right to speak and 
 to report. Baldwin writes in the preface to his work: “My soul is witness. ” 
 This “witnessing” is based upon and bounded by an authority that is 
 tangential (in quite different ways to that of the conventional narrative of 
 murder) to the “facts” from which the narrative of murder is commonly 
 constructed. To say his soul is witness is to speak out of and for history; to 
 speak about social injury, rather than an incidental and idiosyncratic vio¬ 
 lence. His reading of murder works against the generic preferences of 
 true crime; indeed, his is a countemarrative of murder. 
 
 Baldwin problematizes the position of subject in an overtly political 
 way. Unlike the ethical agendas of the clinical and juridical “experts” 
 whose reauthorings of the murder narrative I examine in Chapter Three 
 above, Baldwin’s ethics is a critique of a liberalism and democracy that 
 aims at social control. His treatise is quite unlike the generic tale of true 
 crime, within which authority is inscribed through reference to the pa- 
 thologized figure of the murderer, whose “truth” (and the meaning given 
 to murder, therefore) is to be found in his or her difference and indif- 
 
 152 Murder 
 
ference to context. 33 True crime attempts to align the reader with the 
 storyteller who unravels the matted fabric of supposition and speculation 
 that is at the heart of the murderer’s silence. 34 As the jury that rules on the 
 “facts” is allied with the judge who rules on the “law,” the assumed al¬ 
 liance of reader and writer in true crime is one of arbitration, of power. 
 This is not to say, of course, that readers of true crime are literally law- 
 abiding, Republican-voting supporters of the death penalty. Indeed, true 
 crime has been implicated a good number of times in the very mur¬ 
 derousness that it thrives on portraying. 35 
 
 The counternarrative of murder is characterized in part by the way in 
 which authority within the text is provided by a larger discursive context: 
 by the refusal of the author to give up a position (and a history) or to allow 
 his reader similarly to surrender an ineluctably social subjectivity. Bald¬ 
 win refuses to invest the murderer with authority or to build the story 
 from out of the murderer’s psychic history and visceral trail. 36 In The 
 Evidence of Things Not Seen the unproven guilt of Wayne Williams is but 
 part proof of the text’s status as a counternarrative of murder. The degree 
 of his guilt is less important than the extent to which the putative mur¬ 
 derer finds collaborators in the community, the state, and the Republic: 
 
 The author of the crime is what he is —he knows it, can make no more demands, nor is 
 anything ?nore demanded of him. But he who collaborates is doomed. 37 
 
 This refusal to treat the murderer as the clarifying lens of murder is 
 symptomatic of a more general suspicion about easy answers, about “au¬ 
 thority” in general — a suspicion that is at the heart of the rise, from the 
 1960s, of a culturally endorsed, politically critical narrative form. The 
 aesthetics of that overtly political form in a “postmodern” age is, accord¬ 
 ingly, different. The supposed inscrutability of Wayne Williams that 
 Baldwin describes is not merely a function of his cool demeanor in court, 
 nor is it the impenetrable mystery of “true evil.” Williams forms a kind of 
 dead spot in Baldwin’s text because he is written not as the yfuthor of his 
 act, but as its author: small “a.” Unlike that earlier and more confident 
 age which sought, in its discourse of murder, the amplification and clar¬ 
 ification of the act’s meaning in the murderer’s psyche, Baldwin is com¬ 
 pelled to understand that the conduit of Williams’s mind leads straight 
 back to the malls, vacant lots, and riversides of the Atlanta so familiar to 
 its poor. 
 
 Killing Grounds 153 
 
Certainly Baldwin writes about Williams, 38 or, rather, what was said 
 about Williams in an attempt to explain him: that he was hopelessly 
 spoiled, that he was homosexual, or that he had been abused by his fa¬ 
 ther. 39 Such explanations are, at the very least, insufficient. “The world,” 
 writes Baldwin, “is catastrophic with spoiled children.” As to the accusa¬ 
 tion of abuse, “even if it were true, it is a universal not to say daily event, 
 and has nothing to do whatever with the slaughter of the children of 
 Atlanta.” 40 Nothing to do whatever! Not with killings in Atlanta or Harlem 
 or Oswego or Wichita Falls. The questions asked of Williams in court in 
 an attempt to get at the measure of his pathology are not just irrelevant 
 there, in the context of any or all of the killings he has done, but are 
 irrelevant and insufficient in so many other cases where similar questions 
 are asked. 
 
 Baldwin’s skepticism here is reminiscent of work that stresses the gen¬ 
 der blindness of legal and criminological discourses on sexual murder. 
 The world is certainly “catastrophic” with abused children, most of 
 whom are female. These women do not necessarily grow up to become 
 abusers themselves, and they are extremely unlikely to become mur¬ 
 derers. 41 The propositions advanced by lawyers and psychiatrists fail to fit 
 the enormity, or perhaps the banality, of the facts of murder in an extraor¬ 
 dinarily racist and gender-riven world. Feminist critiques of male vio¬ 
 lence arguably cannot do their theoretical work if extracted from an 
 analysis of related systems of discursive violence, particularly that of 
 race. 42 Baldwin’s treatise on the violence of the racist Republic refuses to 
 make the murderer a scapegoat, and that refusal is a significant strategy 
 common both to certain feminist critiques of male violence and to cri¬ 
 tiques of the violence of endemic racism. Both arguably aim toward the 
 deconstruction of hierarchies of difference that are structurally encoded, 
 codings symbolically upheld by the individualizing and biologistic dis¬ 
 courses of criminology and forensic psychology. 
 
 At the conclusion of the work, Baldwin suggests that “Wayne Williams 
 must be added to the list of Atlanta’s slaughtered black children.” This 
 symbolic listing of Williams with the dead is the definitive turn in Bald¬ 
 win’s critique of the true Authorship of the Atlanta Child Killings. Wil¬ 
 liams, of course, is not literally condemned — having escaped the imposi¬ 
 tion of the death penalty. But the point at issue is his dismissal, and with it 
 the dismissal of the case of the twenty-eight dead (reduced so cunningly 
 
 154 Murder 
 
by the stirring of the judicial mix to its essence of two). Williams has been 
 tidied up with all the other loose ends of the case (carpet fibers and all). 
 The black police commissioner who oversaw the manhunt receives a 
 phone call from Houston and accepts the commissionership there, and 
 everyone is quick to “defend” the commissioner’s decision to move. But 
 what Baldwin hears in this bluster is not a commendation of Commis¬ 
 sioner Lee Brown’s talents, but applause for the “case itself, and the 
 verdict.” Brown, like so much else in that problematic case, “was moved 
 on up, and, above all, out.” 43 This “dismissal” is the logical end to a case in 
 which the race of the principals has been everywhere obvious but never 
 actually seen. It is also a logical end to a case of child killings where the 
 killings will continue, although their author is imprisoned. Unlike femi¬ 
 nist criminologists like Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, who 
 advocate a return of responsibility to the murderer for his actions (in 
 acting out the fetish of misogyny), Baldwin is resolute in his indictment of 
 the “collaborators.” Williams, after all, is another black “child,” whereas 
 the murderers that Cameron and Frazer study are white men. 
 
 On one level, Baldwin’s refusal to lay upon Williams the meaning of 
 the murders reflects the sermonlike qualities of the piece. But he is not 
 preaching forgiveness, as such, when so much of the treatise is formed by 
 sheer fury. Williams is not absolved of responsibility for his actions — 
 although, as Baldwin disavows the verdict, the degree of harm the “mur¬ 
 derer” has caused remains unresolved. For Baldwin the meaning of the 
 Atlanta Child Killings lies in the anxious need of the authorities to aggre¬ 
 gate, contain, and explain them. Baldwin’s reaction to the verdict was a 
 “steady, chilled wonder” at the “relief” of those so “anxious to accuse and 
 condemn” Williams. When the committee formed by Yusef Bell’s mother 
 began to organize in order to publicize the crimes in Atlanta 
 
 that whistle forced Authority to enter, control, and close a case concerning 
 slaughtered Black children, most of them males, a banality with which (and I am 
 witness) they had never, previously, been remotely concerned. 44 
 
 “Authority” with a capital “A.” It would be misleading to analyze Bald¬ 
 win’s displacement of meaning —from Williams, as “author” of the 
 crimes, to the “Authorities,” who explained him — as merely characteris¬ 
 tic of that brand of liberalism from which there arose in the 1960s and 
 1970s a theorization of crime that emphasized social, rather than individ- 
 
 Killing Grounds 155 
 
ual, causation. Certainly Baldwin’s analysis has much in common with this 
 liberal tenet of faith, but the fury of the piece is the measure of its differ¬ 
 ence. Liberalism in America is strongly implicated in the “collaboration,” 
 in the rationalizations of “Authority,” that called the Atlanta Child Kill¬ 
 ings “serial” and dismissed them with the disposal of the body of the 
 murderer. 45 These are “yesterday’s Liberals, the Negro’s friends, who 
 have now become the Neoconservatives.” 46 Liberalism’s beautifully naive 
 equation concerning the causation of crime (poverty = crime) was merely 
 a glance in the right direction, whereas Baldwin made the reader stare, 
 long and hard, into the heart of the Republic. 
 
 The Evidence of Things Not Seen is but one of Baldwin’s written salvos in 
 a long-drawn-out battle with his nation of birth. Twenty years before 
 visiting Atlanta to cover Williams’s trial, Baldwin wrote an essay in which 
 he first used the epigraph for the later Evidence of Things Not Seen. Refer¬ 
 ring to a play he was then staging, Baldwin wrote that one of the charac¬ 
 ters, a murdered child, 
 
 is all the ruined children that I have watched all my life being destroyed on streets 
 up and down this nation, being destroyed as we sit here, and being destroyed in 
 silence. This boy, is, somehow, my subject, my torment, too. And I think he must 
 also be yours. I’ve begun to be obsessed more and more by a line that comes from 
 William Blake. It says, “A dog starved at his master’s grave [tic] / Predicts the ruin 
 of the State.” 47 
 
 Baldwin’s misquote made something of a conundrum out of what, by the 
 1980s, had become an ominous statement indeed: “A dog starved at his 
 master’s gate / predicts the ruin of the State.” The old liberals who had 
 become Reagan’s New Conservatives knew well enough the threat of the 
 “starved dog” at the gate, a threat that supposedly justified the trend 
 toward mandatory and determinate sentencing, greater police powers 
 and, among other things, the “war against drugs.” Hard-line policy 
 stemmed from a polarizing conceptual and actual framework: the in¬ 
 sider/outsider of the “anthropologist/informant” binary that defines the 
 relationship of sociologist and criminal (or, more prosaically, the apart¬ 
 ment guard and the tenant whose security he/she ensures). American 
 advisers on crime and criminality have over the past decade been return¬ 
 ing to the concept of an “underclass” as the proper focus of social re¬ 
 search. By its very definition, and regardless of the means by which its 
 
 156 Murder 
 
composition is identified, the “underclass” is an outgroup that requires — 
 through welfare most of all — containment and control. 48 For Baldwin, 
 this was the Horatio Alger line of sociological reasoning: “the problem is 
 not ‘race’ but ‘class’ — meaning: those who find themselves on the bottom 
 belong there.” 49 
 
 It is in the context of such social, criminological, and juridical thinking 
 that Baldwin’s text must be read. His choice of ground for one of the last 
 skirmishes in a lifelong battle against the duplicity of the (white) Ameri¬ 
 can Dream was hardly arbitrary. The story of the “menaced boy,” as 
 opposed to that of the “Negro problem,” finds its fullness in Baldwin’s 
 last visit to Atlanta. 50 “The menaced boy” is no figment of the imagina¬ 
 tion when a young African American man is seven times more likely than 
 a white to die by violence. 51 The tale of the “menaced boy” inadvertently 
 told by the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta echoes Bald¬ 
 win’s tale. That coincidence is the tale of murder where murder, by its 
 statistical nature, becomes a matter of race. 
 
 The Gendering of Race in The Evidence of Things Not Seen 
 
 The tale of the “menaced boy” is also, unavoidably, a gendered one. 
 There are analytic sympathies between the feminist discourse on sexual 
 and domestic murder and Baldwin’s analysis of the violence of the White 
 Republic. However, one of the most unremarked upon anomalies of the 
 “pattern” to the Atlanta Child Killings was the presence of two female 
 victims among the total accounted to Williams. And what of the still- 
 unsolved murders of thirty-eight girls and women (of whom four were 
 white) killed over the same years and found in the same general areas as 
 Williams’s alleged victims? 52 WTat a silence surrounds these others — 
 beaten, stabbed, shot, and left for dead in one of the city’s many desolate 
 spaces. The women and girls who did not “fit the pattern” were perhaps 
 the most obvious evidence of its fallaciousness — evidence that Baldwin 
 nonetheless ignored. It is the story of the “menaced boy” that compels 
 him. His preoccupation is understandable, certainly, given the vulner¬ 
 ability of the young African American man to a continuum of violence. 
 And yet, that vulnerability — masked by bare statistical fact — is structured 
 by a complex conceptualization of African American “manhood.” 
 
 Killing Grounds 157 
 
Perhaps one of the most problematic components of Baldwin’s analysis 
 is his concept of a “manhood” historically denied African American men. 
 His conceptualization of “manhood” is an elision of the literal black man 
 and the black subject who is forced to attain the status of subject by the 
 contorting and impossible process of becoming white (that which defines 
 the position of subject). And yet there is no thing, no being, that is white: 
 “they were many colors, but they were not White.” To assume manhood, 
 and the position of social subject, was to emulate what “was, at once, a 
 menacing, overwhelming, inescapable Presence and an echoing, intoler¬ 
 able absence.” And worse, one was “forced to imitate a people for whom 
 you know — which is the price of your performance and survival — you do 
 not exist.” This “series of paradoxes” is the defining condition, on- 
 tologically and metaphysically, of being black in modem America, the 
 condition of being s/Subject. The concept maintains a gender even in the 
 face of the open and ungendered metaphysical status of the subject. This 
 contradiction is not, of course, the double bind of subjectivity that Bald¬ 
 win seeks to convey. His parable of “becoming White” explains the 
 means by which color (or the ineluctable position for the African Ameri¬ 
 can of that which is “not-becoming-White”) defines the “community 
 [that] could always bury its differences long enough to make certain that 
 the Black could not rise to a place of sufficient recognition or threaten the 
 structure of the labor union or the city or the state.” 53 
 
 This definition of the exclusionary power of a White Republic that 
 elevates and “whitens” every “color” but black is itself reliant upon the 
 process by which Baldwin argues that subordination has historically been 
 accomplished: the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) emasculation of 
 black men. 54 In a brief analysis of that particular devastation of African 
 American manhood called “sorriness,” Baldwin pictures the imminent 
 and literal threat to the black man that comes when he “declares himself a 
 man.” “Sorriness” stems from the overprotectiveness of women w ho try 
 to save their sons, brothers, or husbands by making them hide the black 
 manhood that is so threatening and incomprehensible to white men — 
 who are, indeed, quite willing to destroy the object of their derision. “All 
 of our mothers, and all our women, live with this small, doom-laden bell 
 in the skull, silent, waiting, or resounding, every' hour of the day.” 55 And 
 those women are caught both ways: spiritually killing their sons by^ unwit- 
 
 158 Murder 
 
ting complicity with the White Republic’s emasculating hatred, or, in 
 “making them men,” seeing them punished for that affront to white man¬ 
 hood (and white women’s virtue ). 56 Racial terror therefore makes black 
 women and their men complicitous in their own holocaust: “Brother may 
 never grow up — in which case, the community has become an accom¬ 
 plice to the Republic .” 57 
 
 The “emasculation” of the black man is a central mechanism of the 
 maintenance of white supremacy because it helps to ensure that African 
 Americans, alone of all “immigrants” to the United States, have the least 
 upward social mobility of any section of society. The “dilemma” of Amer¬ 
 ican manhood is its disorganization . 58 The “legend and the reality of the 
 masculine force and role” is such that black men, less pragmatic than their 
 women, continue to “dream”; to push the limits of “being Black” in the 
 “republic that imagines itself White” to the point, often, of their humilia¬ 
 tion or destruction. And the black male “really cannot bear [humiliation], 
 it obliterates him.” This particular fragility of the black male means that 
 he, unlike women who “manage ... to stunning and unforeseeable effect, 
 to surmount being defined by others,” is destroyed by his very strength 
 and hope: 
 
 [W]hen a man cannot feed his women or his children, he finds it, literally, impos¬ 
 sible to face them. The song says, Now, when a woman gets the blues, Lord / She 
 hangs her head and cries / But when a man gets the blues, Lord / He grabs a train 
 and rides . 59 
 
 “He grabs a train and rides.” Here, then, is but one of the metaphorical 
 inscriptions of the literal diaspora that is, for Baldwin, the African Ameri¬ 
 can “experience.” 
 
 In a country where the “family” or male wage still dominates, as does a 
 matrix of powerful masculinist discourses of independence, success, and 
 mobility, the subversion of African American “manhood” is an issue still 
 to be reckoned with. Baldwin is not advancing an entirely uncritical defi¬ 
 nition of masculinity, nor does he assume a “real” — meaning essential — 
 masculinity. Indeed, the “Republic has absolutely no image, or standard, 
 of masculinity to which any man, Black or White, can honorably as¬ 
 pire .” 60 A feminist critique of his position on the black American dilemma 
 of “sorriness” would have to reckon with the changing conditions of the 
 
 Killing Grounds 159 
 
construction of masculinity as opposed to the relative continuity of a 
 prescribed and prosmbed black manhood. 61 But it would also question, as 
 Hazel Carby did, 62 a construction of the category of black women as 
 “women” in a way that deprives them of any useful historical definition 
 other than their position vis-a-vis their imperiled men. 63 
 
 Baldwin’s conceptualization of African American manhood shares 
 much with a masculinist homosocial ideal that has been associated with 
 black militants and activists since the 1960s, and yet it is also qualitatively 
 different. 64 Baldwin, like many black activists, spoke for and from the 
 place of the urban, northern black man. And yet this “manhood” is under 
 question if held to the terms so unequivocally stated by Amiri Baraka 
 (LeRoi Jones) when he quipped that “white men are trained to be fags.” 65 
 Toward the end of his life, Baldwin was finally able to write about the 
 terrors of the “American idea of masculinity” in that “hall of mirrors” of 
 race and sexuality. Early in his life, Baldwin had fallen in love with a man 
 at a time when he w r as still committed to becoming a pastor in the black 
 church. The collision of these two (seemingly) mutually exclusive pas¬ 
 sions — each itself an impossible faith to risk or retain for a young, poor 
 black man in Harlem — destroyed for him forever “all of the American 
 categories of male and female, straight or not, black or white.” 66 
 
 The repetition of the metaphor of the mirror throughout Baldwin’s 
 criticism is a significant one. Identity is never clear or singular for Bald¬ 
 win, but is a fragmented, distorting, or multiple “reflection” of all the 
 various incarnations of being: class, “color,” gender, and sexuality. The 
 mirror is as unreliable as the eye of the beholder. We are both made and 
 weighed as we “move in the vast and claustrophobic gallery of Others, on 
 up or down the line, to the eye of one’s enemy or one’s friend or one’s 
 lover.” 67 
 
 “Having no balls” meant, for Baldwin, both more and less than it did 
 for the “much man” —however and wherever that figure existed. As a 
 “faggot” or a “pussy” he had no “balls,” and yet men and w^omen would 
 still seek out the “big black dick” that was the mythological standard of a 
 feared and desired black manhood. 68 It is the presumption of others, and a 
 history" of myth, that distills the lives of those w'ho live in the “real” world; 
 that marks out the space of the subject. Baldwin is correct to assume the 
 very" real and dangerous effect of the great American dreams of whiteness 
 
 160 Murder 
 
and masculinity upon those in the “gallery of Others.” He does not credit 
 those things as true, but simply as ineluctable. 
 
 In his exposition on the investigation and (false) closure of the case of 
 the Atlanta Child Killings, Baldwin’s concept of that qualified differ¬ 
 ence—the trick of the mirror —is a crucial one. The essay “Here Be 
 Dragons” is contemporary to The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Both con¬ 
 clude with a similar injunction. While Baldwin ends the latter work with a 
 plea for Americans to realize the imperative of community, 69 he also ges¬ 
 tures toward the androgyny and indeterminacy that structures both sub¬ 
 ject and community: “[Ejach of us, helplessly and forever, contains the 
 other — male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. 
 We are a part of each other.” It is the denial of the fact that we are all 
 implicated, one with another, that finally explains the horror and coward¬ 
 ice of the Atlanta Child Killings. The “pattern” that resulted in the pro¬ 
 motion of the murders from the work of a quite prosaic violence to that of 
 a single “evil” individual was constructed from a tortured, and inconsis¬ 
 tent, use of the concept of difference. All the victims were black—a defi¬ 
 nition that was arbitrary inasmuch as it was based only upon the fact that 
 they were not white. And the “children” were supposedly alike — just that, 
 children — despite their different ages, sex, class, or means of death. In this 
 way an aggregate was created. A group was defined by their difference 
 from others (including other murder victims who, arbitrarily, did not 
 make the “pattern”) and was constructed as an “entity” by the conflation 
 of discrete characteristics into constituent “parts.” 
 
 Baldwin’s allusion to a radical concept of implication — whether as an¬ 
 drogyny or the literal mix of black and white blood so sternly denied by 
 the very differentiating power of the terms “ethnicity” and “race” — is the 
 final measure of the text’s powerful ethical quality. His analysis of the 
 social context of the so-called Atlanta Child Killings can be identified as a 
 counternarrative of murder by its refusal to found its narrative generically 
 in the subject of the murderer. Indeed, Baldwin’s refiguring of the con¬ 
 cept of “community,” and his refusal to credit the discursive processes of 
 differentiation and discrimination that the White Republic so ruthlessly 
 deploys, make impossible the use of the murderer as “Author.” The singu¬ 
 lar and determined space of the murderer as subject simply cannot exist, 
 however undeniable his literal existence. As counternarrator of the mur- 
 
 Killing Grounds 161 
 
der tale, Baldwin fractures the subject of the generic tale of murder, 
 finding in that rift quite a different authority. 
 
 When the U.S. Supreme Court refused to give its support to George 
 McCleskey’s claim that the rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amend¬ 
 ment had been denied him, the Court voted for the legal subject and 
 against the man. Arguments are still made in accredited law journals, and 
 before courts of appeal and last resort, that —essentially —the life of a 
 white person is valued more highly than the life of a nonwhite. Statistical 
 evidence, suggesting generally that the severity of punishment is linked to 
 the race of the victim, is perhaps the most persuasive proof of that dictum. 
 The high value placed on the lives of white middle-class property owners 
 is the flip side of a system that cares less for those w r ho have less: people of 
 color, the poor, and children and women (where they are unprotected by 
 referred status). The Court, in its wisdom, looked to an equal standard for 
 all individuals in the fictitious “citizen” and failed utterly to see the social 
 aggregate in an obviously unequal society. Formal legal reasoning asks 
 that discrimination be proved, directly, in each instance, as issuing from 
 the immediate context of the “aggravating” situation and to immediate 
 effect upon the claimant. The looming term “immediate” stands outside 
 any intelligible social context. Legal formalism stands in direct opposi¬ 
 tion to Baldwin’s concept of implication and community. It denies events 
 their history, and people their place in that history. Legal reasoning is, in 
 and of itself, an aestheticizing discourse. Its resurgence in recent deci¬ 
 sionmaking suggests that uncritical discourses of murder — arising not 
 just in the courts but in criminological thinking, the news media, and 
 society at large —will dominate, rather than those ethical countemarra- 
 tives that may contest them. Countemarratives of murder are marginal 
 and yet they, perhaps alone, attempt to make unfamiliar the actual (mean¬ 
 ing political) banality of murder. That sense of unfamiliarity is produced 
 by a refusal to employ the common generic conventions of the murder 
 narrative. 
 
 162 Murder 
 
8. Ghosts 
 
 I have given my life to ghosts in the closet, ghosts under the bed, 
 ghosts in the basement, ghosts in the boxes I have carried with me all 
 summer. I am transient now in my own life, stopping over wherever I am, 
 living only in the story I have to tell. 
 
 Ann E. Imbrie 
 
 What we take life to be is what our lives become. 
 
 James Baldwin 
 
 In America today one of the most morally (if not legally) taboo of crimes is 
 the killing of a child by its caregiver. The vitriol heaped upon mothers 
 who kill their children in the United States is not muted, as it is in the 
 United Kingdom, by a category of infanticide that not only recognizes 
 mitigating circumstances but describes in itself a crime distinct from 
 murder. 1 There is no such distinction made in the United States. And yet 
 there remains in American homicide law a sense if not of attenuated 
 responsibility for such crimes, then of the lesser degree of harm they pose 
 to “society at large” (that great —if obtuse —legal standard of the com¬ 
 mon good). The milder penalties attached to infanticide in Britain find an 
 American parallel in the refusal of state legislators to attach to family or 
 intimate killings the kinds of legal sanctions imposed for the killing of 
 strangers. While torture-murder, or murder by hire, or murder for finan¬ 
 cial gain all fit the criteria of aggravating circumstances and qualify as cap¬ 
 ital crimes, parental abuse killings or other “domestic” crimes elicit death 
 sentences only where other “aggravating” factors are present. 2 The lower 
 value placed upon the lives of those killed within literal or de facto families 
 is demonstrated by the reluctance to upgrade penalties for parental abuse 
 and wife killings, despite increasing public opprobrium for such crimes. 
 
Kate Millett’s contention that “when a woman does it to you it’s different” 
 says more, in both cultural and legal terms, than even she intended. 3 
 
 Critiques of a “progressive,” liberal cultural order that professes merely 
 to minister while actually disciplining its citizens necessarily focus upon 
 the construction of hierarchies of difference within that order. The dif¬ 
 ferentiating constructs of race, class, gender, and sexuality work simulta¬ 
 neously and ineluctably on the subject in culture, and yet Baldwin and 
 Millett tend to privilege one or another construct. 4 The following is an 
 analysis of one of these contemporary, explicitly political narratives of 
 murder. Kate Millett’s The Basement , like James Baldwin’s Evidence of 
 Things Not Seen , forms part of a larger assault upon the constructive (and 
 destructive) power of the white, capitalist and — as she sees it —patriarchal 
 republic. 
 
 Millett’s critique forms part of a relatively small feminist scholarship 
 dealing with women who kill. Feminist scholarship on murder tends to be 
 divided into two not necessarily distinct branches: those primarily in¬ 
 terested in women who kill and those concerned with deadly violence 
 against women. 5 Representing the latter group, Jill Radford opines (per¬ 
 haps a little mournfully) that the patriarchal phenomenon of “woman 
 killing” has not received the attention it deserves as scholars have rushed 
 to explore the statistically and socially aberrant woman who kills. 6 And 
 yet it would be perilous to assume that the two branches of scholarship 
 are really that distinct. Groundbreaking feminist interrogations of biolo- 
 gism and theories of social conformity (which have structured the crimi¬ 
 nological, juridical, and penal response to women offenders and victims) 
 are essential to both projects, despite the different objects of their en¬ 
 quiry. Those who study women who kill are caught in an uncomfortable 
 double bind, needing to establish the agency of their subject but also 
 qualifying that subjectivity in reference to the reality effects of a discourse 
 within wffiich there is scant choice between the monster and the dupe. 
 Those who study women as victims are more readily able to eschew r that 
 difficulty, coming hard up against another in its place: that of the agency 
 of the victim. Kate Millett’s work on the torture-slaying of Sylvia Likens 
 partakes of both these problematics, and although it was written too early 
 to have the benefit of recent theorizations of what might be called “victim 
 agency,” 7 Millett enters into a curious and complex engagement with 
 killers and killed alike. 
 
 164 Murder 
 
Thirteen years after the original publication of her work on the killing 
 of Sylvia Likens by her “primary caregiver” and a group of neighborhood 
 children, Kate Millett explained that “The Basement happened to me.” 8 
 Writing this, she was in part simply trying to show the degree to which 
 the case affected her. After all, she had literally been obsessed with what 
 happened to that sixteen-year-old over a couple of months in India¬ 
 napolis, during the autumn of 1965. (Sylvia Likens and her sister Jenny 
 had been left in the care of Gertrude Baniewski, a divorced mother of 
 seven, by their parents, who were traveling “carnies.” The already poor 
 household found it difficult integrating the two new dependents, and the 
 stress apparently led to Baniewski abusing Sylvia, either herself or vicar¬ 
 iously through one of the children she had instructed to aid in “disciplin¬ 
 ing” Sylvia. Over a period of months the abuse escalated to the point 
 where Sylvia was locked in the cellar and was prevented from eating, 
 drinking, or using the toilet. Gertrude and/or the children would torture 
 her with beatings, burnings, and scalding baths. Sylvia eventually died 
 from an accumulation of wounds, and her death came to light at a point 
 when Baniewski was still dithering through a plan to pass off the girl’s 
 death as accidental.) It took Millett nine years to reduce the enormity of 
 her horror to a single text. And yet the author performed a deft inversion 
 of chronology and meaning in that short sentence: she named the crime 
 by her book title. The scene of murder haunting her those ten years did 
 not become The Basement until she wrote it. 
 
 A Structural Critique of Patriarchal Violence 
 
 The Basement is a complex and perhaps contradictory text. It can be read 
 as a stringently ethical narrative and a reauthoring of the murder, a proj¬ 
 ect that has, therefore, something in common with the texts examined in 
 Chapter Three above. Through the text, Millett alternately occupies the 
 characters — the subject positions — of murderer, accomplice, victim, and 
 the many implicated witnesses to the girl’s death. Reviewers have charac¬ 
 terized Millett’s flow-of-consciousness style as an attempt to “re-create” 
 the crime, calling it evidence of the “psychojoumalistic” nature of the 
 text. How like Curtis Bok’s prose chapters in Star Wormwood is Millett’s 
 occupation of the burned, starved, beaten subject that is Sylvia Likens, or 
 
 Ghosts 165 
 
her possession by the tired, tranquilized, bored figure of the murderer, 
 Gertrude Baniewski, who made the girl her sport and her redemption? 
 The fictionalizing process is similar, but the political projects underlying 
 the fiction differ signally. 
 
 “Life suggests an interest in certain stories,” Alillett wrote, a quarter 
 century after she had first been “ambushed” by the “chief story” she 
 would ever tell. 9 It is her definition of that “chief story” which marks both 
 the similarities to and the differences between her text and that of the lib¬ 
 eral jurist Bok. Within this “chief story” is a compelling pattern, the sin¬ 
 gle fable that explained all, the “shadow at the back of the cave” —the 
 fountainhead of human violence. Within it also, in the very nature of 
 telling the story , is catharsis, the place in which “the heart changes . . . 
 utterly.” This belief in the project of tragedy and pathetic resolution is the 
 hallmark of a humanism even more ambitious than that which animated 
 Curtis Bok to write his treatise condemning capital punishment. Millett 
 has a belief in the political integrity of her fiction that Bok never had. 
 While this is not to say that Bok w r as less affronted by “injustice” than 
 Millett, his criticisms were contingent and their object superstructural, 
 rather than structural. Millett’s political analysis is indeed structural, even 
 fundamental. The author’s faith in her fiction does not reside merely in a 
 hope that it will lay bare the mysteries of the “facts” of the case and 
 provide exclusive entry to the minds of the murderer and the victim. Her 
 faith and her A/authority reside instead wdthin the ideological context of 
 the fiction. That politics of gender cannot be argued, but must be told— 
 told as the story of what our lives must necessarily become. (Our lives: the 
 author, the victim, the murderer, and the reader who is ranged beside 
 these three. To enter into the text is to be vulnerable, to b & feminine): 
 
 This is not didacticism or the logical highway of a doctoral thesis ... this is closer 
 to the mysteries, the tragic and symbolic, something finally inexplicable, some¬ 
 thing endured cathartdcally. . . . Savagery ongoing but exposed here, clarified, 
 revealed so that it can no longer be lied about or ignored or dissembled or passed 
 off as anything else, as something wicked or just twisted and senseless, a meaning¬ 
 less random event, something local or explicable through abnormal psychology or 
 subject to various interpretations. 10 
 
 Millett’s text does inherit something from the sociological tales of mur¬ 
 der told by Wertham and Bok, those tales that made the topology of 
 
 166 Murder 
 
the murderer an interpretive act requiring the “local knowledge” of an 
 anthropologizing expert. The amateur enthusiasm of Bok for forensic 
 psychiatry or the considerable psychotherapeutic expertise of Fredric 
 Wertham overlaid a metaphorical, mythical and, in many ways, histor- 
 icizing frame on tales of murder that were historically and culturally 
 located. Millett’s ethical project refuses the certainty of a disciplinary 
 frame, but it does rely upon a foundation that is essentialist, archetypal, 
 even metahistorical: 
 
 This is the chill of an evil essentially collective, social, cultural, even political. It is 
 the site of an old crime, old as the first stone, old as rape and beatings: it is not just 
 murder, it is ritual killing. 11 
 
 Human violence “overwhelmingly understood” is the product of a trans- 
 historical and transsituational encoding of sexual shame, a sexual shame 
 that is an integral mechanism of patriarchy. To retell the story of Sylvia 
 Likens’s acceptance of that shame, and her death because of that accep¬ 
 tance, is to expose the archetypical pattern of violence in the patriarchal 
 world. Millett’s fiction arises, if you like, not from artifice or style, but 
 from unmediated access to genetic memory. In this way, the author claims 
 a quite novel authority in the tale of murder. A culturally encoded sexual 
 shame makes the author of the text —like both Sylvia Likens and Ger¬ 
 trude Baniewski (whose voices she adopts) — subjects of that same heri¬ 
 tage of shame, speakers of a common language. The retelling of the crime 
 is, in some radical way, as forceful an act as the crime itself. The fiction, 
 like the murder, is a “historical event”: 
 
 The need for liberation from sexual guilt and enslavement implicit in this histor¬ 
 ical event —for it is that too, not only a Active puzzle or equation but an actual 
 event more resonant and terrible than anything merely imagined —could trans¬ 
 form us all, could burn away millennia [hr] of savagery. 12 
 
 Millett does not, therefore, “merely imagine” the set of circumstances 
 that led to sixteen-year-old Sylvia being branded across her abdomen 
 with the words “I am a prostitute and proud of it.” Millett lives and writes 
 the shame that animated those scarring hands, as well as the shame that 
 eventually stopped Sylvia’s own will to struggle: “Because I was Sylvia 
 Likens. She was me. She was sixteen. I had been. She was . . . what 
 ‘happens’ to girls_We all have a story like this and I had found mine.” 13 
 
 Ghosts 167 
 
“What‘Happens’ to Girls” 
 
 In a more recent work this line of identification is similarly played out, 
 both in the context of the way in which “life suggests an interest in certain 
 stories” and in the elision of the writer and the killed. Ann Imbrie’s 
 homage to her dead childhood friend, Lee Snavely, murdered —one 
 among a number of other young women — by a serial killer whose area of 
 predation was the Midwest, is more a reconstruction of the dead girl than 
 an enquiry into either “what happened” or the mind of the killer. The 
 work is also, consummately, a story about similarity, about those slight 
 changes in the path of a life, or the negligible differences between people, 
 that can result in radically different fates. Those two adolescent girls 
 in Ohio went different ways, their trajectory governed, it would seem, 
 by the varying pressures, direction, and failings of family, school, and 
 relationships: 
 
 This is what I’m doing now, imagining history from the distortions of a present 
 floor plan, seeing my way into the lives of women, like me and not like me, all of 
 them one way or another on their own, Lee and the others who followed different 
 paths to the same terrifying end. 14 
 
 “Who murdered her was never the mystery,” Imbrie writes. The story of 
 the killer, even in Baldwin and Millett, for whom one of their subjects is 
 putative, the other a collaborator, is essential to the text, a part of its 
 wisdom. Yet Gary’ Taylor, who crosses through Imbrie’s text —a man 
 quintessentially on the move, possessor of successive real-estate invest¬ 
 ments (a house lived in, then discarded) — is never the text’s focus, for all 
 of its pow'er to police him, to keep an eye on him. The last sentence in the 
 book is resolute, not at all mysterious: “I have petitioned the state of 
 Washington for the right to be informed of any changes in his status.” 
 Which means, “Where is he? When, and under what circumstances, will 
 he get out?” While asking that the author’s interest in his case be recog¬ 
 nized, Imbrie’s “interest,” like that of those others who survived his dep¬ 
 redations, is a right earned by suffering. She claims an interest in Lee’s 
 place, for Lee and yet for herself. She also denies the killer his mystery 
 and, in the act of unraveling Lee Snavely’s fate, would seem to be de¬ 
 mystifying the life he took. And yet, so much of Imbrie’s text is about the 
 mysterious nature of ordinary lives, of the very typicality that sometimes 
 
 168 Murder 
 
decrees “extraordinary” violence. Like Millett, Imbrie’s textual authority 
 is based upon what she shares and shares with the murdered girl: daugh¬ 
 ter, adolescent girl, rebel. The difference between victim and survivor is 
 slight and, it would seem, circumstantial. Ann Imbrie, like Kate Millett, 
 testifies to a world that she —coincidentally —survived. But, unlike Mil¬ 
 lett, Imbrie’s interest is intimate, was actual. 
 
 Kate Millett wrote that her years of meditation before actually writing 
 the book were a period through which she “grew strong enough to absorb 
 the meaning which this young girl’s death” had for her. Crucially, those 
 years of gestation spanned the golden age of the women’s liberation 
 movement, with all its consciousness-raising about sexual violence, its 
 analyses of the systemic nature of patriarchy, and its strange blend of 
 “meat and potatoes” activism with feminist utopianism. Read in that 
 historical context, the story of Sylvia Likens’s murder could not help but 
 take on a “symbolic character, a metaphoric power” for Kate Millett. And 
 that story, when Millett finally came to possess it, was told in order “to do 
 things, to save lives.” What could be a clearer expression of the intellec¬ 
 tual conditions for production of this text than that terribly brave and 
 naive statement? Millett is herself aware of that naivete as she considers 
 the reception of The Basement when first it was published. Sylvia’s story 
 was one thing, but The Basement is also the story of Gertrude Baniewski, 
 whose voice is heard most frequently in the text; whose voice, in fact, 
 leads the whole chorus. “Gertrude was a paradox, a contradiction.” Ger¬ 
 trude’s story, that of a woman’s collaboration with patriarchal violence, 
 was “bad news around the Feminist campfire” back then. And yet, Sylvia 
 could not be told without Gertrude; that is to say, they arise from the 
 same place. Indeed, their voices, taken up by Millett, seem to come to her 
 from a collective memory of pain, of shame. Unlike the “situated” re¬ 
 membering of Baldwin, whose “soul” was “witness” to those voices com¬ 
 ing from the cultural and historical particularity of “being Black” in the 
 United States, Millett’s “voices” come from a less well defined source. 
 The presentist concerns of both writers must differ where Millett’s ac¬ 
 tivism and her authority both rest upon an assumption of an essential 
 knowledge imparted by the heritage of feminine shame. Millett’s fear of 
 entering into the mind of Gertrude Baniewski dissipated at the moment 
 she “could dare to realize” that she “already knew all about her. So do we 
 all; the problem is simply admitting it.” 15 When we are all so implicated 
 
 Ghosts 169 
 
in the workings of patriarchal violence, such access to the “difference” of 
 Gertrude Baniewski decreases it. The place has changed; the time is past; 
 the child is dead — and yet Millett, the author, walks in the bloody skin of 
 their history. 
 
 For Millett a common heritage of sexual shame gives the author access 
 to the minds of both the murdered girl and her abuser, an access less 
 mediated than refined by her own particular shame. How much was that 
 heritage of shame the exclusive territory of women and girls, whose vul¬ 
 nerability is its object? Coy Hubbard, Rickie Hobbs, and even Gertrude’s 
 own son, John (all of whom participated in the day-to-day torture and 
 victimization of Sylvia Likens), could themselves be shamed, but it was 
 their fear of this possibility that enabled them, so quickly, to take up that 
 shame as their weapon. The boys’ ability to escape the role of victim is 
 never in doubt in the way that it was, say, for Sylvia’s little sister, Jenny. 
 Jenny was often “around” when Sylvia got thrashed with the paddle, or 
 burned with cigarette ends, or was flipped by Coy (who was learning 
 judo); she was also present at the final, and ultimately fatal, group attack 
 on Sylvia. 16 Jenny “helped” in these scenes because her very life depended 
 upon her complicity. She was quite likely to become an alternate or an 
 alternative target should she not cooperate or should she interfere with 
 what was being dished out, so remorselessly, to her sister. She was vulner¬ 
 able because she, too, was just another foster child in an already over¬ 
 crowded household. 17 But she was also a girl: archetypically, therefore, a 
 possible victim. Millett makes it clear that even Paula Baniewski — who was 
 her mother’s “lieutenant” and one of Sylvia’s principal abusers —was 
 never entirely free of the threat that she, too, might somehow bear the 
 physical brunt of that sexual shame. 
 
 In Millett’s re-creation of the torture scene, Paula is impelled to hate by 
 her envy. She was “already heavy with child, with the torpor of her own 
 weight,” and “the natural self-dislike of her obesity forced her to look at 
 and compare herself with the slender, the perfect, the beautiful ... an 
 ideal desired with all the anger hoarded against the unobtainable, the 
 futile, the tantalizing, hung within reach upon another.” Paula’s jealousy 
 is part and parcel of the shame of being female. Rickie, John, and Coy 
 could never feel that particular fragility, and their feeling for Sylvia (in 
 Millett s reconstruction) is not hatred but derision. That distinction sug¬ 
 gests the qualitative difference of their relationship from the shame Sylvia 
 
 170 Murder 
 
embodies: “[H]ow can we imagine a boy in analogous circumstances, 
 based as they are upon a crippling shame dependent upon specific sexual 
 guilt by cultural definition female; modesty and virginity, the question of 
 being a slut or a whore being questions that cannot be raised about 
 him.” 18 It can be seen, then, that “the shadow on the cave wall,” the “chief 
 story,” is largely a portent for women. The shared heritage of shame that 
 founds Millett’s narrative authority in this tale of murder allows Millett to 
 take up the position of the murderer in a curiously surrogate way, for 
 Gertrude is a “Kapo,” a part of the class of victim she, too, has “chosen” 
 to exploit. Gertrude’s abuse of Sylvia Likens is the expression of a vio¬ 
 lence she does not own , but merely leases. 
 
 Elisions 
 
 And here it becomes necessary to return to James Baldwin, who shared 
 the vulnerability of being black (and, once, being a boy) with those about 
 whom his elegiac essay The Evidence of Things Not Seen was written. Mil¬ 
 lett writes that “to be Feminine is to die” but does not then suggest the 
 terms by which her own survival was secured. Later, we find out: a univer¬ 
 sity education, a sexual and intellectual subculture to support her, a politi¬ 
 cal movement in second-wave feminism. She remarks upon her own sur¬ 
 vival only in relation to those others who did not “make it through.” 
 Baldwin, however, can find layer upon layer of armor, or the good luck of 
 circumstance and fate, that protected him. After all, “for the State, a 
 nigger is a nigger is a nigger, sometimes Mr. or Mrs. or Dr. Nigger” but a 
 nigger nonetheless. He was not a Southerner, had financial means and an 
 “honorable” vocation but, for all that, was not his own survival dictated 
 by its own exacting toll — virtual exile? Complicity is a complicated concept 
 in Baldwin’s treatise in a way that it is not in Millett’s “theatre,” despite his 
 subsuming of the problem of gender (and the status of black womanhood) 
 under the embattled sign of black “manhood.” Where Millett finds collab¬ 
 oration, ultimately Baldwin finds implication. There can be no corollary in 
 Millett’s analysis to Baldwin’s uncomfortable realization that 
 
 underlying the tremendous unwillingness to believe that a Black person could be 
 murdering Black children was the specifically Southern knowledge and experi- 
 
 Ghosts 171 
 
ence of how much Black blood is in white veins —and how much White blood is 
 in Black veins. 19 
 
 While the “concept of color,” as a principle of differentiation, does beget 
 racial terror, it is not a fact of nature but a ruse of power. The distance 
 between Baldwin’s analysis of collaboration, implication, and community 
 and Millett’s exploration of Gertrude, the “Kapo,” and the collaborating 
 victims Jenny and Sylvia Likens is defined by the impermeability of sexual 
 difference in the latter. In patriarchy there can be no corollary to the 
 “Black blood in White veins and White blood in Black veins.” And yet, 
 ironically, it is Kate Millett who survives the decree of patriarchy rela¬ 
 tively unscathed, her meditation on “the danger of maybe” notwithstand¬ 
 ing. 20 Baldwin, however, is conscious that he survived and painfully aware 
 that others did not: 
 
 To realize that one is, oneself, and from the moment of one’s birth, both subject 
 and object of the human cowardice — for that is what it is ... of racial terror, 
 demands a ruthless cunning, an impenetrable style, and an ability to carry death, 
 like a bluebird, on the shoulder. 21 
 
 Baldwin’s concept of implication is direct, personal, and entirely thor¬ 
 oughgoing. In following through Millett’s critique of collaboration I shall 
 show that the grounds of her analysis are both too wide (the uncrossable 
 divide of sexual difference) and too narrow (the unscrutinized race of the 
 principals). 
 
 Collaborating Agent/Victim Subject 
 
 This issue of complicity for Millett is both a compelling force in the narra¬ 
 tive and the rock upon which empathy— ns the source of authority in the 
 tale — founders. Sylvia fails to save herself and is complicit in her own slow 
 murder. Jenny fails to save her sister. Gertrude fails to see through the 
 shame patriarchy obliges she assume, a shame she must also visit so vi¬ 
 ciously upon others. But these “failures” speak of complicity with a vio¬ 
 lence that is “other,” that is an “acting out.” Millett struggles w ith the sub¬ 
 jectivity of the murdered girl, the one who cooperates herself to death, and 
 finds herself turning more easily to the position of any or all of the abusers: 
 
 172 Murder 
 
Sylvia, victim and center of the whole legend —how you escape me, grow shad¬ 
 owy. How I lose touch with you, becoming the others, becoming as I must, 
 Gertrude, becoming Coy, becoming Paula and Rickie. 22 
 
 But is not Millett’s occupation of Coy or John or Rickie — given the terms 
 by which her a/Authority is inscribed —a kind of imposture? Although 
 the boys act out a violent script, it is not completely of their own com¬ 
 position. They are children, after all. And the inhabitants of that Indi¬ 
 anapolis household are living below the poverty line on an intermittent 
 income derived from the ironing Gertrude takes in, a pittance received 
 from her ex-husband, and the often late support checks from the Likens. 
 These factors combine in subtle ways to make the abusers themselves 
 fragile, though not absolved of responsibility: 
 
 [Hjere were people so naive they enacted the beliefs of the larger society, enacted 
 them literally, and by going so “overboard” exposed the brutality of that basis set 
 of assumptions. 23 
 
 The assumption being that woman is guilty of her sex, a guilt before 
 which the adolescent girl stands quite undefended. And is shamed. Ger¬ 
 trude Baniewski argued in court that she was trying to “discipline” Sylvia, 
 who “would not mind [her] at all.” 24 The connection between the abuser 
 and the abused is an intimate one. Gertrude is “disciplining” Sylvia, 
 teaching her the meaning of her sex. The point of comparison between 
 Sylvia and Gertrude — between the abuser and the abused — is their rela¬ 
 tionship to a shared, intrinsic sexual shame. For Millett, Gertrude Ba¬ 
 niewski, like her son and Coy and Rickie, assumes a privileged position 
 vis-a-vis the shameful secret that is Sylvia. The power that enables Ger¬ 
 trude to rewrite a violent sexual script —in which and to which she is 
 herself potentially subject 25 — is the power of a complex set of patriarchal 
 institutions and social practices. “Straightening out” Sylvia is both a mis¬ 
 sion in itself and a lesson for the other children about their own relation 
 to shame: 
 
 [T]he boys gotta learn by example. . . . Not just my Johnny but the others that 
 are given me to instruct. To know the real deep seriousness. Because that’s what it 
 is finally. Sylvia just plain refuses to be serious about what life is, the hardness, or 
 the mysteries, the will of God, the burdens. Her duty before her is being a 
 woman. 26 
 
 Ghosts 173 
 
The church that preaches against sin and for the values of family com¬ 
 bines with the secular power of the state (in the form of the social worker, 
 that ever-present guardian of the poor) to give Gertrude, as figurative 
 “mother” and head of the household, the authority to “instruct.” “Cor¬ 
 rection” is such an important mission (one undertaken alone by an adult 
 among children) that it takes on a dangerous yet seemingly sacred power: 
 
 One does not say: “I will torture the child to death.” Torture was surely not a 
 word Gertrude permitted herself. . . . She was “correcting” the child, “disciplin¬ 
 ing,” using a firm hand. All terms that she must have begun with and then lost 
 sight of later. 27 
 
 The concept of the “wayward child” is only intelligible in reference to 
 those moral institutions that dictate filial and community norms, that 
 define belonging. The murder of Sylvia Likens arises, therefore, not from 
 pathology — which is defined as aberrance — but from an overdetermined 
 norm. 28 Thus, even throughout the trial Gertrude was insistent that Syl¬ 
 via needed correction, and that her actions in administering that correc¬ 
 tion were justified. Gertrude argued, by inference, that the murder was 
 the result of the children’s interference and co-option of her legitimate 
 business of correction. 29 In this way, Gertrude appeared merely to have 
 failed to save Sylvia, rather than to have destroyed her. The children made 
 an anarchic parody of the adult moral mission. 
 
 Gertrude’s power to reprove Sylvia was underwritten by those impor¬ 
 tant cultural institutions that intersect with and structure the family. Ger¬ 
 trude’s evangelical church, for instance, gave its blessing to the “firm 
 hand.” Disciplining Sylvia, for Millett’s Gertrude, was “the Lord’s work 
 and sacred.” 30 Millett, constructing Gertrude’s impassioned monologue 
 on her duty to correct Sylvia as an example to the other children, refers 
 to the trial evidence that both Gertrude’s pastor and the local welfare 
 authorities took her word as the caregiver of that loosely bonded and 
 sprawling family and just left her to it. On one of his ministering visits, the 
 Reverend Roy Julian sat on the couch, listening sympathetically to Ger¬ 
 trude’s tale of woe about the uncontrollable child, while Sylvia —the 
 whole time —was locked in the basement. 31 Gertrude’s authority excelled 
 that even of Sylvia’s older sister, who, when she came to check on Sylvia 
 and Jenny, was turned away at the door by Gertrude with the words, “I’ve 
 got permission not to let you see her.” 32 This is a curiously vague phrase. 
 
 174 Murder 
 
Whose permission does Gertrude have? Of course, one assumes she 
 means Lester, Sylvia’s and Jenny’s father: the absent grant-all of paternal 
 authority. But behind the phrase, in its very openness, is a matrix of social 
 institutions that guard the privacy and the integrity of the “family” in all 
 its approved incarnations. Gertrude is a woman, the natural mother of her 
 seven children, and the recipient of various welfare, alimony, and child- 
 support checks. She is, therefore, the logical titular head of this family. 
 Even the welfare agencies that supposedly police the integrity of the 
 “family” interfere only under duress, and in very particular circumstances. 
 Gertrude was able to fob off the visiting public-health nurse who wanted 
 to see the children, using the excuse that she could not see Sylvia because 
 she was, as Millett characterized it, “unmanageable, loose” and “hadn’t 
 been there for days.” 33 The nurse had come to investigate an anonymous 
 report that the Baniewski household harbored a child with “running 
 sores.” The interference of the welfare authorities was prompted not by a 
 concern for the children per se, but by a fear of ill health and all its 
 attendant antisocial ramifications. The neighbors who endured Sylvia’s 
 screams of pain for weeks before her death also declined to intervene, not 
 willing to ascribe any desperate meaning to that clamor. Another mother’s 
 method of chastising her children was not, after all, their business. The 
 nearest neighbors, the Vermillions, nearly rang the police on the last night 
 of Sylvia’s life, but not because of her screaming. She had been scraping a 
 shovel on the cellar floor in a last-ditch attempt to attract attention. The 
 Vermillions were ready to call the police only because the noise was 
 keeping them awake; it stopped before they could do so. 34 There is no 
 altruism here. From the church, to the public-health authorities, to the 
 neighbors, the interest or lack of interest shown in the doings of the 
 Baniewski household is structured by a conception of the inviolability of 
 family, however flawed may be its particular examples. And yet Millett 
 neglects to situate the family here in one signal way. I cannot help but 
 wonder whether the leeway extended Gertrude Baniewski by her church 
 and the health and welfare authorities would have been so great if she and 
 her charges had not been white. Recent scholarship has indicated the 
 much greater vulnerability of African American women and Latinas and 
 the penetrability, more generally, of the poor, nonwhite family (par¬ 
 ticularly the female-headed sole-parent unit) before the law, welfare, and 
 the health authorities. 35 
 
 Ghosts 175 
 
In Millett’s analysis there is a distinct continuity between Sylvia’s failure 
 to save herself, Jenny’s collaboration in her sister’s torture, and the indif¬ 
 ference of outsiders to the actual functioning of the Baniewski household. 
 Sylvia is quickly convinced that she must have done something to warrant 
 her continued abuse. Jenny is sure, too, that Sylvia must have trans¬ 
 gressed in some way, even if she cannot see how; she also knows she is 
 herself close to the line of that undefinable “bad.” And the church, wel¬ 
 fare authorities, and neighbors tend to assume in their different ways — 
 knowing children, knowing girls, knowing “poor white trash” —that the 
 child must have done something wrong. 
 
 As a product of second-wave feminism, it is not surprising that The 
 Basement locates the backbone of patriarchal power in the family. A more 
 novel facet of Millett’s work is her attention to the elements of sadomas¬ 
 ochism she perceived in the torture-slaying. Her forays into the subjec¬ 
 tivity of Gertrude Baniewski, the “Kapo,” follows a dominant strain in 
 feminist analyses of the murderous violence of women. Gertrude’s vio¬ 
 lence is the product of internalized misogynistic hatred and stems from 
 her own history of being abused. She passes on to her weaker, more 
 vulnerable wards the violence originally dished out to herself. Millett’s 
 portrait of the female collaborator, however carefully elaborated, is the 
 cultural and institutional context to Baniewski’s “family” and is, in many 
 ways, archetypal. Gertrude, like Wertham’s “Mary,” could be described as 
 a “modern Medea”: “a woman who in the desperate process of asserting 
 her womanhood in a hostile world seems to negate that very woman¬ 
 hood.” 36 While the social situation is limned critically here, the concept 
 of “womanhood” is, contradictorily, taken for granted. In Millett’s anal¬ 
 ysis, Gertrude’s disciplining of Sylvia signals the seriousness with which 
 she takes her role as mother and, therefore, her identity as woman. Ger¬ 
 trude’s need to instill in Sylvia a sense of shame indicates her desire not 
 just to make “a woman” out of the girl, but to prove that she, herself, is a 
 woman who knows her place. The heritage of sexual shame reconstructed 
 and reinscribed through Gertrude’s abuse of Sylvia may have its context in 
 the particular constructive powers of class and family in contemporary 
 American culture, but its origins are ancient. 
 
 Millett’s portrait of the female collaborator is a vivid one. How like or 
 unlike various other stereotypical or archetypal figures of female mur- 
 
 176 Murder 
 
derousness was Gertrude Baniewski? Her autonomy in the household — 
 an adult among children — makes her a distinctive case. She was a woman 
 who killed a child, a fact that need not be statistically extraordinary. That 
 fact does, however, signal the likely reading of her act as reprehensible , 
 given pervasive cultural beliefs about the nurturing role of women. The 
 position of Gertrude Baniewski is a peculiar one: located somewhere 
 between stereotypical vulnerability —i.e., a woman who takes out the 
 violence leveled against her on others — and fully conscious and indepen¬ 
 dent agency, whose violence stems from obscure sources. If it is held to be 
 untenable (as it was by the trial jury) that Gertrude did not know what was 
 going on in the house, then it is certain she provided the impetus for the 
 systematic torture of Sylvia Likens. It is this guilt, and the very degree of 
 Gertrude’s murderous agency, that is the central focus of the explanatory 
 strategies of Millett’s fiction. (The “problem” of Myra Hindley for femi¬ 
 nist analysis is instructive here. Ian Brady has conventionally been por¬ 
 trayed as the more evil and instrumental figure in their partnership, 
 Hindley’s slavishness to his whims being composed of a combination of 
 naivete, sexual obsession, and fear. Hindley, as collaborator, is at least 
 partly absolved. That scenario has largely been accepted by feminists, 
 who rightly reject the other predominant explanatory strategy, which 
 thoroughly demonizes Hindley as a figure of the Monstrous Feminine. 
 The problem with cleaving to the former strategy is that a conceptual¬ 
 ization of Hindley as collaborator —and, therefore, victim as well as 
 abuser — denies her the fundamental agency that feminism, as a system of 
 revisionist thought, seeks to bestow upon the subject in history .) 37 
 
 Sylvia does not become the speaking subject in the fiction until it is 
 two-thirds complete. She is the blockage around which the flow of narra¬ 
 tive eddies. And the source of that flow is the murderer herself, Gertrude 
 Baniewski. The writer’s immersion in her subjectivity is testimony to the 
 degree to which Gertrude’s position as collaborator is supposedly avail¬ 
 able to every woman under the hegemonic decree of patriarchy: “Ger¬ 
 trude’s screaming still echoing in my mind, but she is easier to know, to 
 hear again in every fight one ever had. One’s own bullying yell not that 
 hard to summon. But you are harder, Sylvia, the figure bowed before 
 Gertrude is harder to be .” 38 
 
 It would seem to be easier for Millett to inhabit the position of the 
 
 Ghosts 177 
 
abuser than that of the victim. Yet Millett writes that one can “get far with 
 Gertrude but not the whole way. Finally it baffles.” This point of baffle¬ 
 ment is not reached in the narrative reconstruction of the crime, so much 
 of which issues from the murderer’s internal monologues. In analytic 
 terms, that bafflement —the dropping-off point of meaning in the mur¬ 
 der—is ideological. To “go the whole way” with Gertrude would be to 
 assume the position of an agent of patriarchy, the murderer, rather than 
 the subject of patriarchy, who is both collaborator and victim. Thus, 
 although Millett narrates the scene of torture to its ugly completion 
 (from the murderer’s standpoint), the analysis that accompanies the nar¬ 
 ration must outstrip and abandon Gertrude. Gertrude becomes merely 
 the figure of the collaborator. This reinscription of the mystery of murder 
 occurs in Millett’s description of the insidious cultural encodings of pa¬ 
 triarchy that make of Gertrude a murderer: “Gertrude acted out of faith, 
 convictions, beliefs, convoluted notions, ideological rather than material, 
 forces in the mind, inscrutable, mysterious.” Sylvia’s murder comprises 
 an aggregate of conditions only secondarily material: poverty, unemploy¬ 
 ment, depression, illness, all of which are part and parcel of Gertrude’s 
 life. That materiality is merely an effect of those fundamental “ideological 
 forces” about which Millett writes above. The shame that defines being 
 feminine is acted out in specific cultural and institutional settings but is, 
 in itself, somehow archetypal. Even here the ghosts of mythical arche¬ 
 types appear: Medea and, explicitly, Herostratus: “And Gertrude [be¬ 
 cause she is the author of this monstrosity] is like the man of ambition 
 who burned the Temple of Ephesus in order to become immortal ?” 39 
 The violent order of the world that Millett critiques ranges out from the 
 Baniewski household, through Africa, where clitorodectomy is still prac¬ 
 ticed, back through the Holocaust, even into the imaginary Africa of 
 Kurtz’s atrocities in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. To range so 
 widely in search of “the nature of pain, of cruelty” is to lose sight of the 
 overcrowded household on a New York street without appearing to have 
 turned away at all. Millett looks through the autopsy portrait of Sylvia’s 
 battered face, her lips chewed half away, to find not Sylvia’s story, but “the 
 fountainhead of human violence” itself. 
 
 The Basement plots the murder of Sylvia Likens as sadomasochistic 
 ritual, a ritual undertaken in the normality of the domestic situation. Its 
 
 178 Murder 
 
props are rope, the paddle, a lit cigarette; even more banal objects such as 
 stacks of ironing, a blaring tv, the bath, the litter of pop bottles in the 
 cellar . 40 It is in the wake of the exposition of Gertrude’s sadism that 
 Sylvia’s voice finally enters the fiction. The scene is one of the transition 
 from the simple, if frightening, domestic situation of punishing a child to 
 the much more intense disciplinary scene where one obliges, by the act of 
 dominance, another to submit: 
 
 Don’t look at me that way girl. Don’t you dare stare me down with them strong 
 looks. Fold your eyes down child or you’ll feel my hand mighty fast. Don’t move I 
 told you. Stand there perfecdy still and answer me. First I want you to lower your 
 eyes and lower ’em good. Right down at your shoes. I want ’em pointed right on 
 the floor. An inch in front of the toe of your shoe. One inch exactly. 
 
 At this cue, the “voice” of Sylvia stardes the reader. She arrives as the 
 innocent, incredulous, not knowing how to take this punishment se¬ 
 riously: “Gertrude being silly. One inch exacdy. What an idiot .” 41 Sylvia’s 
 willingness to play along, to disarm, her hope that if she just “cuts up a 
 litde . . . they’ll break down and smile” is, for Millett, both definingly 
 adolescent and archetypically Feminine. Submission (outside the realm 
 of sexual play) is, after all, a defense — even if it is a failed one: 
 
 To cooperate, to assuage, to hold out the hands to be tied. To beg quiedy. Not 
 to scream because it will make him strike you. To mimic every gesture of submis¬ 
 sion even as in animals, the dog rolling on its back. Even as in women. To be 
 “feminine.” 42 
 
 “To be Feminine ... is to die.” Even after Sylvia very quickly learns that 
 the discipline session is serious, she demurs to what is, in her own under¬ 
 standing, undeserved punishment. She is a girl, and a “child”; her consent 
 to being shamed or beaten is somehow tacit. Millett’s analysis of the 
 intimate contract of abuser and abused, of dominance and submission, 
 derives from a set of ideas that would later give rise to such concepts as 
 the “battered women’s syndrome” and “learned helplessness.” The inter¬ 
 ests of captor and captive, abuser and abused, supposedly coincide when 
 the culture of captivity—even of extermination — is total. Millett builds 
 on a kind of Arendtian analysis of passivity based on the experience of 
 concentration camp survivors, a vision of sadomasochism totalized : 43 
 
 Ghosts 179 
 
And why shouldn’t the victim be seized with the same enthusiasm, the same 
 madness or at least the same motivations as those of the captors?... [T]he victims 
 of ideological crime have a most difficult time keeping their minds free, even if their 
 minds were so to begin with, were formed and set and resolute. 44 
 
 Millett adds a kind of intellectual asperative to the phrase “ideological 
 crime.” It is a phrase that does not recur in the work, but its presence is 
 felt everywhere. “Ideological crime,” in the context of her analysis, de¬ 
 scribes a continuum of violence, institutional and individual: kidnapping, 
 rape, torture-murder, the genocide of the Nazis. And, implicitly, the 
 death of Sylvia Likens: an act which must have required — in that it was 
 drawn out over months — some of the victim’s tired compliance . 45 Poten¬ 
 tially, Millett’s use of the concept of “ideological crime” should militate 
 against the otherwise essentializing direction of the work, for it is a his- 
 toricizing term. “Ideological crime” implies an analytic remedy to the 
 “othering” principles of conventional, positivist analyses of crime. Mil- 
 lett’s ideological analysis is about the particular circumstances — social, 
 institutional, and domestic — that led to the death of Sylvia Likens. Yet 
 the wider “politics” of her tale of murder posits an archetypal violence 
 that gives content to those modern forms of cruelty. Kidnapping, rape, 
 murder, and genocide are all crimes achieved through the “indoctrination 
 of terrible consequences” that constructs a victim or captive long be¬ 
 fore either the whip hand is poised to strike or the cell door is closed. 
 The mechanism of that indoctrination is structural, and the “ideological 
 crime” stems from an operation of hierarchy that might be called “pa¬ 
 triarchy” or, better still, “hegemonic masculinism.” But why should these 
 crimes be distinguished so rigorously? What crime could not be called 
 ideological? The issue of Sylvia Likens’s complicity, like that of the status 
 of Gertrude as “Kapo,” is central to Millett’s definition of the “ideological 
 crime.” The murderer and the victim are bonded by the very instrument 
 of the latter’s torture: not the paddle or the lit cigarette, but feminin¬ 
 ity itself. Both move in the same terrible gravity —the weight of sexual 
 shame that is their heritage and their bequest. 
 
 Millett’s Sylvia, meditating on the horror that has overtaken her, ges¬ 
 tures toward the mechanism of her own implication: “ When a woman does 
 it to you it's different. . . . That’s how Gertrude’s got me so I don’t know 
 what to do .” 46 Sylvia is disarmed before Gertrude not just because she too 
 
 180 Murder 
 
is a woman, and therefore expected somehow to be “safe,” but because 
 she is also mother to the girl. The different response of each to the 
 burden of sexual shame is dictated by their position relative to the pow¬ 
 erful institutions of patriarchy mentioned above. Millett’s figuring of 
 Gertrude Baniewski as murderer is a metaphorical device aimed at expos¬ 
 ing the essential violence of the institution of family. Moreover, the bond 
 between Gertrude and Sylvia that underlies and subverts their polarity as 
 murderer and victim in the tale of murder exemplifies the self-defeating 
 agency of women under patriarchy. Parent and child, mother and daugh¬ 
 ter, pastor and parish, social worker and beneficiary — each of these pair¬ 
 ings is hierarchical, an inequivalency of power pivoting on a mistaken 
 trust in an identity of interest. 
 
 Millett is fascinated with the death of Sylvia Likens, with the lesson of 
 her vulnerability: 
 
 You have been with me ... an incubus, a nightmare, my own nightmare, the 
 nightmare of adolescence, of growing up a female child, of becoming a woman in 
 a world set against us, a world we have lost and where we are everywhere re¬ 
 minded of our defeat. 47 
 
 “A world we have lost.” This rueful phrase shows the extent to which 
 Millett’s critique is about essence and archetype as well as a historically 
 situated “oppression” of women. It is the bond of “femininity” that fasci¬ 
 nates Millett —her own similarity to the murdered subject. Millett feels, 
 perhaps, that she herself has narrowly missed becoming a terrible and 
 unforgettable story. Yet that similarity is itself historically situated; it is 
 not a more generally realized “femininity” to which Millett here alludes. 
 The slippage between the author of the tale of murder and the vanished 
 subject is an integral mechanism of authority in the narrative. Millett 
 writes to Sylvia (“What you endured ... emblematic”) and as her . 48 What 
 authority is it that the author assumes in order to speak to and as the 
 victim and, contradictorily, about her absence? It is simultaneously essen¬ 
 tial and historically contingent: the fate of “being feminine” and the 
 coincidence of place, time, and culture. “Because I was Sylvia Likens. She 
 was me. She was sixteen. I had been .” 49 
 
 It is this positioning of the author and its inscription of authority in the 
 tale of murder that makes The Basement distinctive. Yet Millett has not 
 written as thoroughgoing a counternarrative of murder as has James 
 
 Ghosts 181 
 
Baldwin in The Evidence of Things Not Seen. The political and ideological 
 terms of Millett’s fiction — that identity of interest binding the author to 
 the text, just as surely as it does the murderer to the victim — cannot quite 
 mask the depth of the author’s fascination w ith the disappearance of her 
 subject and with the relics not of a life lived, but of a drawn-out death: 
 “Finally, it is not even faces one studies, but artifacts. The pictures of 
 things. Of place and milieu and object.” 50 Throughout the text Millett is 
 struck by wonder at the material traces of the story of Sylvia’s death. In 
 that wonder is held the w'hole mystery of murder, of the “truth” always 
 escaping — long gone, and irremediably so, like warmth from a corpse. 
 
 Murder and the Photograph as Artifact 
 
 In one short passage Millett spans the full spectrum of that wonder as she 
 moves from a description of the photographs of the house in which the 
 murder took place to her reminiscences about how r the house actually 
 looked: 
 
 I have seen both the house itself and its photograph; they are different. The house 
 today has been repainted and has lost the terrible power it had in the photograph, 
 austere in its peeling paint, its thirsty wood, that almost mythic sorrow' it gave 
 off — a power that pictures can convey into things, a force much grander at times 
 than their ovm actual presence. 51 
 
 The curiosity that makes the author visit 3850 New' York Street ten years 
 after the murder occurred is in itself hardly surprising: researchers be¬ 
 come fascinated by even the most mundane subjects. What is startling 
 about this passage is its unconscious enactment of the basic mechanism of 
 authority in Millett’s fiction: “a power that pictures can convey into 
 things, a force much grander at times than their own actual presence.” 
 “Presence” in the tale of murder —with its vanished victim and its often 
 inscrutable murderer —is always reconstructed; it relies upon the reading 
 of traces, of “evidence” that is fragmentary, ambiguous, or contradictory. 
 Everything about the truth of the event —its immediacy —is lost. The 
 victim cannot testify to her ow n murder, and the recollection of events by 
 witness and murderer is often suspect. The event of murder, as narrative, 
 is supposition. It is something that must alw'ays be imagined, and that 
 
 182 Murder 
 
imagining is necessarily a narrative exercise. In such a narrative space, 
 designed to recapture a moment that is lost as it occurs, even the ensuing 
 parade of “evidence” comes to seem like an array of ciphers: signs toward 
 a displaced truth. The photographs of the murderer on the courthouse 
 steps; the photograph of the victim lifted from the high school yearbook; 
 the coroner’s close-up of her demolished face; exterior views of the house 
 from the books of evidence — faces become things, and things take on a 
 spectral identity. The peeling outer walls of 3850 New York Street and 
 the chewed-off lips of Sylvia Likens are ultimately the same. Relics. 
 
 Ann Imbrie, trying to pick up the trail of her childhood friend, already 
 then more than ten years dead, also looked to the photograph as evidence 
 and narrative: 
 
 I’ve come to much of my story, what I can’t know or didn’t observe myself, 
 through photographs, which I have learned to read, imaginatively, like a text. A 
 photograph is the next best thing to being there, and the next best thing to a 
 photograph is a good description of one. 52 
 
 Imbrie’s faith in the photograph is such that she will accept its power to 
 tell, even if that power is only referred. What is the difference, then, 
 between saying “I saw ...” and describing the face once seen, and saying 
 “There is this photograph . . .”? It would seem that the photograph has 
 greater presence. Photography is the perfect medium to convey loss and 
 mortality. The “permanence” of the medium and the idiosyncratic nature 
 of the photographic gaze both counterpoint the fragility of the moment 
 claimed by the photograph. Millett looks into the photographs from the 
 books of evidence and finds in the household detritus pictured there the 
 reality and materiality of a time long passed. And yet that “presence” is, 
 ironically, the presence of portent. As Roland Barthes has noted, photo¬ 
 graphs testify to what was, but it is their very timelessness that makes 
 them ominous: 
 
 [B]y attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces 
 belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality 
 an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the 
 past (“this-has-been”), the photograph suggests that it is already dead. 53 
 
 The photograph, as illusion, is perhaps the perfect corollary for the func¬ 
 tion of the murder narrative, and is also, therefore, its perfect accompani- 
 
 Ghosts 183 
 
ment . 54 The photograph provides for the longevity of the mystery of 
 murder, rather than its dissolution. Millett’s fascination with the moment 
 preserved in the books of evidence reflects the urgency of the story to the 
 author— not its timelessness as such, but its immanence. 
 
 Describing the photograph of the basement in which Sylvia was kept 
 prisoner for so long, Millett writes: 
 
 [E]ven the ordinarily inoffensive presence of a few probably empty paint cans and 
 an overturned plastic clothes basket, even these take on the taint of what has 
 occurred here, an aura permanent now and to remain forever after the event or 
 any of its participants, imbued now indelibly over the indifferent paper of police 
 and news documents. 55 
 
 The photographic evidence of the murder, then, has a special quality. It is 
 not “indifferent.” For Millett the “stark black and white photographs of 
 each room” were her “touchstone and . .. dramatic tableau .” 56 The pho¬ 
 tographic relics invite interpretation and gain meaning through narra¬ 
 tive. They formed the ineluctable “reality” that enabled, even demanded, 
 the construction of the fiction. The photographs are clearly the key to 
 Millett’s “total immersion” in the murder. It is the photographs, rather 
 than the transcript, that determine her engagement with the subject, her 
 taking on of their voices. 
 
 Ironically, Millett’s belief in the power of the photographs, in the 
 freight of mortality they carry, betrays the distance between the author 
 and her subject. As narrator, Millett is caught in a double bind. In order to 
 “be” Sylvia Likens (“Because I was Sylvia Likens. She was me”) the au¬ 
 thor has to be other to her, someone who has survived, who has come 
 through, someone to testify. As Barthes put it, “History is hysterical: it is 
 constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it —and in order to 
 look at it, we must be excluded from it .” 57 
 
 The common bond of feminine shame that obliges and enables the 
 author to assume the position of both murderer and victim in this text is a 
 fragile one, its fragility exposed by Millett’s fascination with the past 
 moment of murder: mortality preserved in the photographs of the corpse, 
 the crowds, the untidy house. That fascination amounts to an acknowl¬ 
 edgment of the mystery of murder, and to the difference between the 
 author and her vanished subject. Even as Millett acknowledges the un- 
 knowability of the “truth” of Sylvia’s murder, she forcefully reinscribes 
 
 184 Murder 
 
the presence of the dead woman, as if she were speaking to a photograph: 
 “But you are Sylvia. I did not make you up. You happened .” 58 For Millett, 
 Sylvia’s absence itself has a presence. 
 
 The assertion of identity between the Author and her vanished subject 
 is integral to Millett’s project. Yet that project can be achieved only 
 by becoming other to that subject, by its reinvention. That apparent 
 seamlessness — irremediable absence rewritten as presence, past time as 
 timelessness —is part and parcel of the “mortal” text, the tale of murder. 
 In writing The Basement Millett tried to sunder time and distance to re¬ 
 create Sylvia Likens . 59 One mechanism for doing so was to introduce to 
 the reader an envoy from the past, a living relic to bridge the distance 
 between the dead and the living; between image and reality. When speak¬ 
 ing at the University of South Florida, Millett briefly mentioned her 
 upcoming project on the Likens’s case. After the talk, a young woman 
 came up to Millett and told her she’d attended school with Sylvia. At a 
 following session, the girl again appeared and handed her a rose, saying, 
 “This is from Sylvia.” Millett was clearly touched, taking the offering (the 
 girl, the rose) as a sign: “Strangest and loveliest gift, the girl herself 
 vanishing like an apparition .” 60 Later, at a gathering in a friend’s studio, 
 Millett finally spoke to the girl: 
 
 Loathe to pump, but here, after all, was someone real and alive who went to 
 school with Sylvia, knew her or knew her a little, knew her as real and not 
 the figure in my tale, my tabloid world of press cuttings and news photos and 
 transcripts. 61 
 
 The girl did, in fact, remember Sylvia only slightly, “clowning” in the art 
 class they shared . 62 For Millett, it was not important that this girl knew 
 Sylvia only “a little.” What was important was that she had “made it 
 through”: 
 
 In those ten years since the murder this young woman had traveled very far. She 
 was Sylvia or someone from that place and time who’d made it through. . . . 
 Meeting her, it was as if everything had been different. As if it almost hadn’t 
 happened. At least one had got away.... As if there were one Sylvia still surviving, 
 one who had made it out of that milieu. 63 
 
 This girl had “made it through,” had “traveled very far.” Her “survival” 
 was measured by the degree of her difference from “that milieu” of her 
 
 Ghosts 185 
 
youth: “Arsenal tech, even that neighborhood and its distance from fine 
 arts and lesbian life-styles and radical feminism.” The girl that handed 
 Millett a rose “from Sylvia” was, perhaps, the most unusual “survivor” of 
 those times, and her presence in Millett’s company signifies the writer’s 
 definition of “survival” as something more than merely living through 
 one’s times. This girl had joined the relatively small ranks of scholarship 
 students; had become part of youth’s diaspora, escaping the hometown to 
 the more exciting, cosmopolitan subculture of a large university. Even 
 more significantly, this girl had taken the children, had left a marriage and 
 “somehow in the changes sweeping along, she had become a lesbian and a 
 feminist and a painter and was just now finishing a Master of Fine Arts.” 64 
 In other words, this envoy from Indianapolis’s working class-district of 
 1965 had become like the author: lesbian, feminist, artist, arts graduate. 
 Other contemporaries of Sylvia that Millett might have met had not 
 “made it through” to that extent. Indeed, how could she have recognized 
 those more typical “survivors”: women sunk into early marriages, or 
 poorly paid sendee jobs, tired faces that scanned the supermarket shelves 
 for better buys to feed the children? Yet it is this most unusual emissary 
 from the “milieu” of the murders who imparts to Millett the vital “clue” 
 to the killings: 
 
 [T]he thing that helped me, that made me understand — looking not only for 
 traces as I was but clues (the old riddle of why did they do it and why did she let 
 them)... Sylvia’s peer gave me the key. Because when I asked what it was like to be 
 a girl that age there and Sylvia’s classmate when the thing came to light, she said it 
 was to be ashamed. 65 
 
 The “clue” and the “trace” become one another. The envoy brings a rose 
 “from Sylvia” and the new r s of w r hat it was, in the end, that killed her. The 
 figure of the girl is a complex one: she is real, but she is atypical, she is real 
 but she “vanishes like an apparition”; she “is” Sylvia, yet she brings tid¬ 
 ings from Sylvia; 66 she “is” Sylvia, yet she is a younger version of the 
 author. By combining such qualities, it is not surprising that the girl with 
 the rose carries the “key” to Sylvia’s story, which is and cannot help but 
 be — by then — Millett’s story. 
 
 Locked in the dark basement, waiting for her captors to begin the abuse 
 again, Millett’s Sylvia realizes the key to her capitulation: “When a 
 woman does it to you it’s different.” 67 In Millett’s narrative of murder, it 
 
 186 Murder 
 
is the qualitative nature of cruelty that signifies. Her working of the con¬ 
 cept of ideological crime — that mechanism of masculinist hegemony that 
 constructs murderer and victim as dependent terms (in a sense that ex¬ 
 ceeds mere semantics) — relies upon her understanding of the difference of 
 women. Women simultaneously occupy the position of subject and ob¬ 
 ject, and their status as historical agent is accordingly difficult. Yet the line 
 of that difference is also one of identification, a delimiting mark that 
 allows Millett, the author, to merge with her subjects — murderer and 
 victim alike. Read through the lens of an essentdalized concept of femi¬ 
 nine difference that demolishes actually the subtle mechanisms of dif¬ 
 ferentiation that have operated historically, the story of the murder of 
 Sylvia Likens becomes a parable about shared identity. The identity of 
 interest that Millett envisions is problematic: the largely illusory identity 
 of “sisterhood” and, ironically, the unacknowledged shared identity of race. 
 In Millett’s writing of difference as similarity, via the notion of the shared 
 burden of sexual shame, that “kinship” — however treacherous — is the 
 analytic flaw of this counternarrative of murder. 
 
 The generic voice of true crime tends to speak for the majority (from the 
 position of a generally undefined “normality”) about chaos at the subcul¬ 
 tural and psychological margins. Despite the identification of author and 
 murderer so integral to the genre, the narrator becomes a kind of moral 
 umpire, on the side of “fair play” and a society whose set rules the mur¬ 
 derer has defied. In the previous two chapters I have discussed ways in 
 which that particular order has been taken to task. For Baldwin and Mil¬ 
 lett, murder occasions a discussion of the context of the violent act in a 
 culture and history organized around dominance. To differing degrees, 
 for Baldwin and Millett, it was the scene of murder, and not its instru¬ 
 ment, that gave meaning to the murder. The killing ground for Wayne 
 Williams and Gertrude Baniewski was white, patriarchal, capitalist Amer¬ 
 ica — a world that co-opted Williams and Baniewski to kill “their own.” 
 
 Both writers spoke from the margins of those killed at the margins. 
 Baldwin, an African American, homosexual, sometime activist (though 
 cushioned by his literary reputation, his emigre status, and his income), 
 had himself been a subject of scrutiny by one of America’s most powerful 
 law-enforcement agencies: the fbi. His dossier ran to thousands of pages. 
 Millett, a white, lesbian feminist, artist, and “dropout” (despite the re- 
 
 Ghosts 187 
 
spectability of her class and education) could also, by definition, be re¬ 
 garded as an outsider. Both writers admitted to being implicated in the 
 terms of their project, and, notwithstanding Millett’s obsession with her 
 subject, they successfully countered that imposture of objectivity that 
 speaks volumes about the voyeuristic nature of generic true crime. Mil¬ 
 lett’s ethical narrative (however compromised) and Baldwin’s counter¬ 
 narrative of murder speak against the normative dictates of a culturally 
 defined ethics. 
 
 188 Murder 
 
9. The Cast in Order of Disappearance 
 
 Murder is an inherently frustrating subject because it keeps moving away from us, 
 evading us. We want to ask big questions; more than anything else, we want to get 
 the answers to big questions. Yet all we can get at, finally, are the details. 
 
 Wendy Lesser 
 
 You should understand that I would not think of writing your story. It would be my 
 story. Just as The Onion Field was my story and In Cold Blood was Capote’s story. 
 Joseph Wambaugh 
 
 Americans have a stake in the telling of their tales of murder, an interest 
 possibly best defined by the popular and expert controversy surrounding 
 executions — death being a punishment now reserved, in practice, solely 
 for murder. 1 Media critiques of capital punishment, by their minute at¬ 
 tention to the ritual, drama, and pathos of the execution, may serve only 
 to make less dispensable the fatal bureaucracy involved in the production 
 of the murderer’s corpse. The original tale of murder (the crime for which 
 the murderer was sentenced) is told yet again —to help a dubious and 
 possibly forgetful public understand why the state is killing in its inter¬ 
 est— and a second, entirely new tale of murder arises from the execution. 
 While one act is criminal and the other is “justice,” how much difference 
 lies between them in the telling? 
 
 In her recent wide-ranging study of the place of murder and execution 
 in modern American culture, Wendy Lesser writes: “I am interested in 
 our interest in murder.” Positioning this interest in the context of a more 
 general predilection for the murder narrative in American culture, Lesser 
 reveals her own particular tale of murder. 2 1 also intend to tell my tale of 
 murder, which this work, thus far, has circumnavigated. Given the terms 
 of my critique of the “interestedness” in murder of the works examined in 
 
the preceding chapters, what is the presumption of A/authority in my 
 own work? What, in short, is my “interest” in murder? 
 
 Lesser tells the story of a young man she once taught who submitted 
 for assessment a piece of short prose describing a gang fight that culmi¬ 
 nated in a killing. Lesser recalled her feelings of shock and confusion — 
 her awe — on discovering that the writer was the subject of his own tale, a 
 murderer. This anecdote, among much else in the book, is a vital point of 
 reference for Lesser as she sets about defining the appeal of the tale of 
 murder. After all, she herself reads and writes about murder (the first 
 activity not necessarily occurring solely by reason of the second). Hers is a 
 fascination that she feels a certain need to explain which, in this case, is 
 bom of that epiphanous moment when she witnessed the convergence of 
 author and murderer: “In front of us, in our own classroom, sat a self- 
 confessed murderer, if he could be believed (but none of us doubted him 
 for a moment) — a murderer who was nonetheless , or therefore , an extremely 
 talented writer. ” 3 Lesser’s description captures, retrospectively, both the 
 degree of the shock and the listeners’ naivete. What is more, Lesser seems 
 to have remained impressed by the A/authority of that tale of murder, 
 despite its ambiguity. Was the murderer a talented writer despite, or be¬ 
 cause of, his act? (Indeed, the stress in the above sentence would appear to 
 be on the word “therefore,” rather than on “nonetheless.”) 
 
 Placing this incident as the genesis of her motivated interest in murder 
 casts the author in an intriguing light. She is fascinated by the murderer 
 as author, by —effectively —his representation of the unimaginability of 
 murder’s reality. She gives to the author of that once-told tale the ability 
 to get right to the paradoxical heart of murder. It always turns into a story, 
 its agents into characters: 
 
 “You got to remember,” he said, “that when you’re out on the street there, it 
 doesn’t feel like real life. It’s like you’re in a movie all the time. That’s how you 
 think about it — like you’re a character in a movie.” 4 
 
 “That was the final remark,” Lesser admits, “that stayed with me.” 
 Lesser’s analysis of her own interest in murder (and the interest of others) 
 is shot through with an anxiety about the tendency of murder’s visceral 
 “reality” always to “escape” into its representations, into its no less dra¬ 
 matic (indeed, often more dramatic) incarnation as narrative. 5 
 
 190 Murder 
 
Documentary, Drama, or Schlock? 
 
 Televising Executions in a Specular Culture 
 
 The focus of Pictures at an Execution is the 1991 case, KQED v. Daniel B. 
 Vasquez, in which a San Francisco community television station sued the 
 warden of San Quentin for the right to enter the witness area of the gas 
 chamber and film the execution of Robert Alton Harris. Harris was the 
 first man scheduled by the State of California to be executed for nearly 
 twenty-five years. The ramifications of this case form the framework for 
 Lesser’s critique of the public’s interest (“interest” as curiosity and “inter¬ 
 est” as implicatedness) in murder. “A story about an execution ... is 
 initially a story about a murderer.” 6 For Lesser’s purposes, one of the 
 most interesting things about KQED v. Vasquez was the complexity of the 
 legal, moral, and aesthetic argument it engendered within and without 
 the courtroom. These included, on the part of KQED, First Amendment 
 issues (specifically, the public’s “right to know” about acts committed in 
 its name). The prison administration directed its lawyers to press argu¬ 
 ment around the Eighth Amendment (the “right to privacy”) and to 
 highlight concerns about security (that televised executions would in¬ 
 flame feelings in the general prison population and on death row). 7 Con¬ 
 tained within the relatively delimited terms of that debate were wider 
 issues about the effect of televising executions, issues which, once raised, 
 brought with them an assortment of ethical and aesthetic questions re¬ 
 garding the nature of the execution as event or spectacle. 
 
 For Lesser, several ideas are in play behind the complex volley and 
 return of the legal arguments heard before Judge Robert Schnacke. 
 Would a videotape recording of an execution convey more or less of the 
 essential horror of the event to its audience than, say, the oral, written, or 
 sketched reports of the news media witnesses present? Is, indeed, any 
 feeling implicit in the event (the horror is not there — it must somehow be 
 conveyed)? What would motivate an audience to watch such a document, 
 and to what effect? Argument over these issues tended to cross the boun¬ 
 daries of the separate adjudicatory sides, for both were forced to fight on 
 the moral high ground of what was also an aesthetic territory. 
 
 In the recent controversy over the wisdom of televising executions, the 
 ambiguity that Lesser critiques continues to trouble the terms of argu- 
 
 The Cast in Order of Disappearance 191 
 
ment. 8 The defining question of the debate would seem to be whether the 
 televised videotape of an execution would merely titillate the morbid in¬ 
 terests of an audience with a growing taste for the sensational, or whether 
 it would prick the conscience of a community that refuses to deal with the 
 consequences of its continuing mandate for the death penalty. What both 
 these possibilities call into doubt is the status of the representation of 
 murder (in its guise as legal homicide). 
 
 Lesser’s brilliance lies in the subtlety of her analysis of the precarious¬ 
 ness of meaning as affect in the mediated tale of murder. The impact of 
 the tale of murder tends to rely not upon its realism, but its artfulness 
 (although that “artfulness” may take a realist guise). The implications of 
 that fact are profound, given that the source of the tale of murder in 
 modern American culture is, very often, actual killings. Only inside the 
 smaller or wider circle of friends and relatives of the murderer and victim 
 do people experience the direct and inchoate effect of a murder. The 
 emotional impact of that shock forbids the organization of “what hap¬ 
 pened” into a generic murder tale. For someone with a direct interest in a 
 particular tale of murder, it may ironically be more difficult to tell an 
 effective (i.e., producing affect) tale of murder. 
 
 Lionel Dahmer recently published a memoir reflecting upon his son’s 
 crimes. In A Father's Story the elder Dahmer constructs the tale around 
 his horrified bafflement at his son’s brutality. 9 The father’s text becomes a 
 sort of confession to murder, for he seems to feel that he is in some way 
 responsible (or at least implicated) in those crimes he knew nothing 
 about. Unlike the generic conventions of the true crime tale identified in 
 Chapters Three to Five above, Dahmer’s narrative is generated by a 
 complete mystification about the origin of the murders. He simply cannot 
 believe what his son has done, although he knows “what happened” and 
 will not let himself avoid the detail of Jeffrey’s crimes. He will not be 
 vague or coy — the responsibility having somehow devolved upon him to 
 “face up” to the crimes. (Dahmer is less willing to face up to his son’s 
 homosexuality, which tends by and large to be elided or to be taken up as 
 always already tainted, pathological — an inflection merely of the warped 
 sexual being that is Jeff the murderer.) 10 
 
 Dahmer scrutinizes what he remembers of his son’s childhood for an 
 early indication of that murderousness. This anxious reassessment of 
 previously innocent memories, though reminiscent of the way in which 
 
 192 Murder 
 
portent functions in the generic tale of murder, marks the author’s baffle¬ 
 ment (rather than the prescient power of the Author). Lionel Dahmer’s 
 perceived failure to predict the destiny of his son and grasp his true nature 
 marks not the murderer, but his sire, as the focal point of censure in 
 the text. Dahmer is forced to see his son’s “madness” in himself: obses¬ 
 sive thoughts thankfully and luckily controlled; potential murderousness 
 forestalled. This painful self-criticism produces an identification of au¬ 
 thor and murderer that is, perhaps, the complete opposite to the vicarious 
 identification of author and murderer in the generic tale. Where the 
 latter conjures the murderer from out of the disparate but portentous 
 evidence of his or her past, the elder Dahmer cannot connect the boy he 
 raised with the killer he became: “This . . . sense of something dark and 
 shadowy, of a malicious force growing in my son, now colors almost every 
 memory I have of his childhood. In a sense , his childhood no longer exists. 
 Everything is now a part of what he did as a man.” 11 The fact of the 
 murders is absolute here. Their irrevocability is an unscalable wall that 
 casts such a shadow on the past that the search for origins is not just fu¬ 
 tile, but impossible. The troubling and troubled “confession” of Jeffrey 
 Dahmer’s father should be viewed as a counternarrative of murder, and 
 those critics who howled that he was “trading” on his son’s crimes could 
 not be more wrong. 12 
 
 To everyone outside the circle of intimates and acquaintances of mur¬ 
 derer and victim —no matter the extent of their sympathy, their moral 
 outrage, or their fear — the murder, as a historical event, is understood on 
 the basis of its various cumulative reconstructions. 13 The transmutation 
 of event into narrative may not lose the affectivity of the act, but neither 
 does it necessarily ensure it. When an execution is televised there is no 
 guarantee that the documentary nature of the broadcast will make the 
 death of the condemned man actually believable. Meaning as affect can¬ 
 not be guaranteed by the kind, but only by the quality of mediation. 14 The 
 disputes comprising KQED v. Vasquez indicate to Lesser that there is no 
 inherent “truth” status to the videotape document of an execution, for the 
 lack of context and the framing of the event might decrease rather than 
 increase its affective power. 15 The “theatre of actual murder” is an un¬ 
 known quality. Surprisingly, Lesser does not discuss in any depth the 
 implications of the possible video representation of the execution as a live 
 event . 16 Although the same ambiguities would remain in play as to the 
 
 The Cast in Order of Disappearance 193 
 
affective power of the document, the stakes — in terms of the power or 
 “truth” of the text and its appropriateness —would be raised. 17 “Murder 
 stories hinge on the tension between endlessness and finality,” Lesser 
 tells us. And she is quite right. The simultaneous sense of dread and 
 regret, of portent, that is at the heart of the tale of murder is a function of 
 the doubling-back of the tale of origins that constructs its own end. It is 
 also a function of the apoi'ia that is death in the tale: that which vanishes 
 with the victim; the unimaginable that must, nevertheless, be imagined. 18 
 
 The “paradoxical relation to time” of the “murder story inherent in 
 KQED v. Vasquez" is accentuated by the video medium. A locked-down 
 camera, recording in “real time” the execution — from the entry of the 
 condemned into the chamber to the moment of his/her being declared 
 dead —would appear to offer a particularly dramatic or “true” rendition 
 of the metered ritual of scheduled murder. And yet, “real time” is fragile. 
 It is hard to imagine a television network broadcasting an unedited ver¬ 
 sion of the execution. Quickly the “real time” that marks the documen¬ 
 tary integrity of the piece fragments and decays into the episodic high¬ 
 lights so dear to tabloid television. Only a live broadcast might retain the 
 dread of “real time” in the execution chamber. But it might also, simulta¬ 
 neously, change the nature of the document from “news” into rank spec¬ 
 tacle. 19 “Real time,” as a cinematic technique, purports to close the dis¬ 
 tance between fiction and the “real,” imitating the absolutism of lived 
 time: every moment freighted and disappearing. Yet, like all film, its iter- 
 ability marks a surreal, rather than a real, quality. A live broadcast —be¬ 
 cause the moment is documented — stands both as testament to the irrev¬ 
 ocability of the killing (the moment of death) and to the iterability of the 
 historical event which that killing becomes. The dread and regret implicit 
 in the tale of murder (or, as Lesser puts it, “the tension between endless¬ 
 ness and finality”) finds its perfect accompaniment in film, whether the 
 still photograph or the videotape. These all are mortal texts. 20 
 
 The uncertain affective power of any documentary 7 medium stands as 
 testament not to the complete relativity of meaning, but to its vicissitudes 
 in culture. A television movie about an asteroid colliding with the earth, 
 recently screened by a major American network, caused in some of its 
 viewers a panic remarkably similar to that caused half a century before by 
 Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast. 21 Although (as a simple 
 phone call to the station could clear up the confusion) people did not load 
 
 194 Murder 
 
up their Ford trucks and head for the hills, what is remarkable about this 
 story is its testimony to the power of the audience to bestow upon even an 
 unlikely story the authority of a threatening “truth.” If fantastic fiction 
 can be mistaken for fact, then certainly documentary media can be taken 
 as other than “real.” And one cannot with certainty say that the panic 
 caused by Welles’s radio program was merely an effect of the times: the 
 greater ambiguity of a voice on radio; the inability of people to check the 
 reality of that voice; the supposed lack of sophistication of an isolated, 
 rural audience. Although these things cannot be discounted, the fact that 
 a similar panic can occur in a vastly different world suggests that the 
 technical sophistication of media and medium has not affected the basic 
 mechanism of belief (the way in which narratives are constructed and 
 received) in that culture. 
 
 Closure in the Tale of Murder as Execution 
 
 The “interestedness” of a culture in the murderousness that it ethically 
 deplores is a phenomenon that fuels, perhaps contradictorily, both (a) the 
 continued existence of active capital-punishment statutes (plus a super 
 due process which augments the effects of that legislation by an in¬ 
 creasingly detailed moral analysis of just punishment) 22 and ( b ) the market 
 for murder evidenced by the media circus and public protests attendant 
 on executions. Executions continue because they are still rhetorically, 
 symbolically potent —not merely as “just punishment,” deterrence, or 
 retribution, but as analogical closure to the forever open-ended tale of 
 murder. Each murderer killed settles the score for the hundreds of others 
 who are not, who continue (their own lives outstripping the deaths of 
 their victims) forgetful, reformed, lying, denying: “I’m not that person 
 anymore.” Only execution provides (however erroneously) the sense that 
 something is settled. The murderer, like the victim, is irrevocably at¬ 
 tached to the moment of the crime (death returns him or her there). This 
 “closure” is very unlike the closure touted by supporters of the death 
 penalty and by certain of the grieving relatives of the killed as a “psycho¬ 
 logical” or “moral” benefit of execution. 23 
 
 Lesser deplores the mealymouthed humanitarianism of media that re¬ 
 act to the grim spectacle of state-sponsored murder with a sentimental 
 
 The Cast in Order of Disappearance 195 
 
refashioning of the condemned: “the executed murderer doesn’t have to 
 be an innocent victim to be a victim.” 24 In other words, one does not need 
 to clamor over the greater or lesser merits of the personality of the con¬ 
 demned. Whether they have reformed or not, the act of homicide (legal 
 or otherwise) should be the subject of moral scrutiny, all other issues 
 aside: 
 
 [T]he victim’s inherent sweetness or innocence has little bearing on the severity of 
 the crime; but I am now making the even more extreme assertion that even the 
 murderer’s character is largely irrelevant, except insofar as it bears directly on his 
 reasons and motives for committing the murder. Our usual standards for judging 
 human worth are useless in the face of the enormity of murder; normally admi¬ 
 rable qualities like sobriety or honesty or generosity or intelligence or artistic 
 talent do not weigh in the balance against this single catastrophic act. This does not 
 mean that the murderer's only character is his character as a murderer . 25 
 
 As part of her analysis of the redundancy of capital punishment, Lesser 
 argues for this more instrumental approach to murder in legal terms that 
 are also, inescapably, cultural. The logic of such an equation can be inter¬ 
 rupted only by the inclusion of the random —and largely irrelevant — 
 factor of the criminal. Of course, Lesser’s intent in suggesting that the 
 “character” of the killer has little bearing on the issue of either the crime 
 or the punishment (except where it directly relates to motive and execu¬ 
 tion) is to promote a different kind of uniformity to replace that of the 
 absolutist deterrence of sure and sw ift punishment. Historically, the lib¬ 
 eral approach to punishment has failed to eradicate the death penalty but 
 has cumulatively constructed a discourse of power that sifts those “de¬ 
 viants” who are too bad to live from those who are not. 26 For Lesser, the 
 sentimental drift of that kind of carceral power must be halted. Like 
 Susan Jacoby, who critiqued the insufficiency of public vengeance to 
 codify a fitting response to the diverse, distinct, and unquantifiable kinds 
 of violent acts that constitute murder, 27 Lesser suggests that the person of 
 the murderer is functionally irrelevant in the face of the gravity, the 
 irrevocability, of the crime. In concentrating on the execution — the pos¬ 
 sible implications of its specular qualities, the ethical implications of the 
 continued practice of the ritual — Lesser clearly demonstrates her revul¬ 
 sion for the death penalty. Yet her premise that execution is in itself a tale 
 of murder reinscribes uncritically a supposedly self-evident relationship 
 
 196 Murder 
 
of crime to punishment, of murder to execution. The two stories are 
 attached, but their functions are different. Both are tales within which 
 American culture and the American public are implicated (are “inter¬ 
 ested”), uniquely so, however, in the tale of execution. 
 
 Whether the execution is a distinctive subgenre to the tale of murder or 
 an exemplary murder narrative, we are, regardless, left with the irreduc¬ 
 ible presence of the murderer in the text. In that sense, the “murderer’s 
 character” can only be “his character as a murderer.” Lesser tries to main¬ 
 tain a distinction between a process of “ethical or legal accounting” which 
 may take into consideration only those “contradictory ‘motives’ . . . that 
 led directly or indirectly to the murder” and a wider sorting process 
 whereby “readers, writers, news collectors, citizens, fellow human be¬ 
 ings” construct a narrative of murder. 28 Yet that distinction is less clear 
 than it sounds. The “ethical or legal accounting” that defines the crime 
 and leads to the disposition of the murderer may issue, at first glance, 
 from the narrow and well-defined edicts of due process, but it is a formal 
 process constructed under the same conditions, and impelled by the same 
 cultural forces, as those tales of murder which are “of interest” to those of 
 us outside the confines of the law. 
 
 Within the solid structure of Lesser’s analysis appear troubling wraiths. 
 The subject of her analysis is the representation of murder: specifically, 
 the interest and the interestedness of culture in murder. Her analysis is 
 simultaneously literary, legal, and sociological. Lesser asks the “big ques¬ 
 tions,” the answers to which seem evasive (that resistance, I would argue, 
 is itself constitutive of the tale of murder). The empirical basis of Lesser’s 
 work —her interrogation of those details that form the cement of the 
 murder narrative — revolves around the unanswerable core of the matter: 
 the mystery at the heart of murder. While there is nothing outwardly 
 mysterious about the process of an execution (the procedure is codified 
 down to the minute), the bureaucratic veneer masks a murderousness that 
 has no single agent but culture itself. Lesser is tom between her own 
 interest in the appeal of the tale of murder and her desire to demystify 
 that tale in order to make less viable the future of legal homicide. Despite 
 the empirical context to her study, and vital disclaimers notwithstanding, 
 Lesser’s discussion of real and fictional murder — which travels between 
 ethics and aesthetics without an acknowledgment of their essential con¬ 
 tiguity — is written as a metaphysics of murder. 29 She, too, must ask the 
 
 The Cast in Order of Disappearance 197 
 
“big questions” and, without answers, gesture wide into that great and 
 baffling territory which is mortality. 
 
 Like others who write about murder, Lesser cannot avoid the impera¬ 
 tives of a narrative genre that structures absence as presence, that is 
 circular, that thrives on portent. 30 As a subject, murder obliges grandilo¬ 
 quent obfuscation from those who write about it. Lesser constantly re¬ 
 flects upon her own position as a commentator on what, in the debate 
 represented by KQED v. Vasquez, is actually a story about one man’s death 
 at the hands of the state. Her final chapter, therefore, concludes the story 
 of the legal battle, as well as describing her reaction and that of the media 
 to the last moments of Robert Alton Harris’s life, extinguished by the 
 State of California on 21 April 1992. Her fascination with the tale of 
 murder comes at the price of her implication in it, a fact of which she 
 seems largely aware. The metaphysics of murder that she has constructed 
 itself nominates the terms by which that deal is struck: 
 
 Perhaps in part because I was writing this book, Harris’s death had a profound 
 effect on me. It filled me with anxiety and sadness, so that for days I was able to 
 think of nothing else and for months was unable to write about it. Such tribula¬ 
 tions are minor, of course, compared to what happened to Robert Alton Harris. 
 But then, that is part of the terrible irony of the death penalty: we take personally 
 something that is not actually happening to us, so that even the suffering—the one thing 
 left to the condemned man, the one thing we have not deprived him of—becomes our own 
 rather than, or as much as, his . 31 
 
 In her last sentence, Lesser claims the very thing she has so guiltily 
 disclaimed in the sentence before. Spectacle and empathy combine to rob 
 the condemned of his suffering, his confusion, his abject fear. But this is 
 presumption and, sadly, sophistry — however well motivated. Lesser can 
 only guess at the content of Harris’s suffering. As her analysis repeatedly 
 demonstrates, even the witnesses to the execution — who are as well- 
 placed as anyone to report on the condemned man’s “suffering” — give 
 quite different accounts of the same event. 32 Demeanor is all that the 
 reporters can, finally, describe. The experience of dying belongs only to 
 the one who dies (although “experience” is a decidedly problematic con¬ 
 cept here). This is a story of death that the watchers tell. 
 
 Lesser’s implication in the terms of her own analysis is a foregone 
 conclusion. Simply, there is no getting around it. As a responsible author, 
 
 198 Murder 
 
she retains her self-reflexive stance wherever possible. But the act of 
 authorship, the obligation of authority, forbids innocence in those who 
 tell the tale of murder. Only a counternarrative, like James Baldwin’s 
 Evidence of Things Not Seen , is “innocent” — if innocence can be taken as a 
 refusal of the generic imperatives of the tale of murder. Baldwin’s meta¬ 
 physics, his grandiloquence, arise from a quite different place than that 
 obliged by the tale of murder. His “sermon” is not a meditation on the 
 hereafter, but on the here and now; not an apologetic paean to death but a 
 commentary on life in the terms it must be lived. It is not circular, but 
 speaks from a history to the present. While Lesser’s discourse is grounded 
 in particular ethical concerns, it cannot be said to be a counternarrative of 
 murder. Her critique of the conventions and implications of murder’s 
 representation begets the telling, nonetheless, of another tale of murder. 
 
 Interrogation, Confession, and Authority in the Tale of Murder 
 
 All of which brings me nearer to the point where I must make overt my 
 position as author in this particular tale of murder. I can no more avoid 
 being implicated in the terms of my own analysis than Lesser can, which 
 makes it doubly difficult to avoid the irritating tone of confession that 
 infuses so much self-criticism. Yet, the confession must be made, so great 
 is the temptation that strikes even those who have much to lose, like the 
 murderer who throws up her hands and says, finally, to her captors: “Yes, I 
 did it, just like you said. ” One tells the story in the way it must be told, an 
 imperative only partly explained by a desire to approximate the tale as 
 closely to the facts as possible. Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez, for 
 instance, signed statements that told the story of their murders in some 
 depth, much of which was suggested to them by the detectives leading 
 their interrogation. The disputed material — the difference, say, between 
 not only Martha’s and Ray’s version of events, but also between Martha’s 
 first and second statement — could not all be true, but was all necessary for 
 the construction of the prosecution case against them (see Appendix). 
 That case consisted of a set of strategies more diverse than any sequence 
 of actual events that the prosecution adhered to during the trial. Alleged 
 motives were raised and discarded in argument; whole versions of the 
 meaning of the murder might be made redundant by a change in strategy. 
 
 The Cast in Order of Disappearance 199 
 
Likewise the defense chopped and changed its tactics, and with those 
 changes the nature of the underlying tale of murder altered too. When 
 former Federal Judge Marvin Frankel wrote that “trials occur because 
 there are questions of fact . . . [and] the paramount objective in the 
 principal is the truth,” he showed the weird and unwordly optimism, the 
 pedantry, of legal formalism. 33 Long before the “truth,” or those “facts” 
 which are its supposed foundation, there must be a structure of belief 
 within which the “true” and its actual sediments can be weighed. The 
 story comes first. 
 
 When Martha and Ray tendered their statements, 34 they did so in the 
 hope that their cooperation would secure them an indictment in Michi¬ 
 gan, rather than one under the lethal murder statutes of New York. 35 The 
 contradictory detail of their retelling of the events leading up to Janet 
 Fay’s death could not have mattered so much to them when they faced 
 what would be — given the amount of physical evidence available to con¬ 
 nect them to the Downing killings — a fait accompli conviction and life 
 sentence. Saying too much seems to have been a response to that inex¬ 
 haustible curiosity of their interrogators, but it may also have been coin¬ 
 cidental to the process of confession itself. 
 
 Confession, historically defined in the Christian sense of an act of 
 conscience, would appear to be about the reassertion of a subject’s author¬ 
 ity over himself. And yet, following Foucault’s various meditations on the 
 development of the confession as religious ritual (and, as a distinctive 
 development, as legal process), the confession should be seen not as the 
 assertion of the subject, but as a site of intervention. 36 Whether to the 
 priest, the psychoanalyst, or the prosecutor, the story told by the subject 
 as what is felt or what happened is given over to the use of the one who 
 listens — to the discourse that structures the listener and the teller, and 
 that defines the contract of power which is confession itself. Alartha Beck 
 and Ray Fernandez found themselves at the mercy of the renegade mean¬ 
 ing of the stories they themselves initially told, because their confessions 
 were caught up in the migratory paths of meaning that constitute both 
 legal process and the “news.” The helplessness of the accused in the face 
 of their “own” tale of murder is not just the result of their suppliant 
 position before the law, it is also consequent to the general direction of 
 meaning in culture. The story of murder that Beck and Fernandez told to 
 Detectives Clarence Randle and James Toohey, 3 ' and to the county pros- 
 
 200 Murder 
 
ecutor, must have caused enough outrage to prompt their accusers to 
 begin a process of extradition that was hardly standard procedure. The 
 disposition of the case, and the growth of the competing and authorita¬ 
 tive tales of murder to which it gave rise, were not simple effects of the 
 orderly march of due process. The tale of murder as received by police, 
 prosecutor, judge, defense, jury, news media, and public dictated the ex¬ 
 tremity of the circumstances that eventually killed the tale’s protagonists. 
 Simply, the story of the Hearts Killers was too much , and its meaning 
 and effect changed radically from that originally intended by Beck and 
 Fernandez when they “sold” their stories to the Kent County authorities 
 in the hope of lenient sentencing. 
 
 Those of us —like Wendy Lesser, or Joe McGinniss, or Ann Rule (or, 
 indeed, myself) —who write about actual murders are troubled by the 
 murderer, but cannot afford to dispense with the way in which he or she is 
 figured. And the confusion of the person of the killer with the figure of 
 the murderer is pretty much unavoidable, part and parcel of the discourse 
 of murder itself, and not merely an effect, as Janet Malcolm would have it, 
 of the “moral ambiguity of journalism.” 38 While murders might be called 
 banal (predictably unpredictable, they often occur under the most prosaic 
 of circumstances), murder is nevertheless a subject that tends to invite 
 decidedly unprosaic responses. The teller of the tale of murder touches 
 upon grand and unanswerable questions; and that teller, as subject, may 
 not be confined to a desk or computer well removed from the more im¬ 
 mediate scene of the crime. Sometimes the subject of that tale is a lawyer, 
 trial judge, consulting psychiatrist, or the murderer him or herself. 39 
 
 Norman Mailer’s The Executioner's Song demonstrates how the subject 
 in the tale of murder has a tendency to escalate and multiply. Mailer’s tale 
 of murder has no single author, despite the quite extraordinary A/author¬ 
 ity of Gary Gilmore in his own story of murder (as execution). After all, 
 Gilmore successfully directed a legal effort to expedite, rather than delay, 
 the execution of his sentence. 40 Primed for the event, the media death 
 watch had more time, more territory in which to work. Everyone seemed 
 to want “in” on Gilmore’s death, and, as an extra piece of pie at the feast, 
 “in” on the deaths of his victims, Jensen and Bushnell. 41 The media 
 extravaganza attendant to Gilmore’s execution was a circus, the excess of 
 which Mailer is brilliant at exposing. There are so many potential angles 
 to the story that media entrepreneurs determine their plot line on the 
 
 The Cast in Order of Disappearance 201 
 
basis of which “characters” in the real-life drama will sell the rights to 
 their story. And there is a peculiar tension between the idea of detailed 
 general coverage and the concept of the “exclusive” — which is about who 
 gets into print first, rather than who attempts responsibly to sketch the 
 “whole” story (i.e., the “facts” that say depressingly little). If there is an 
 essence to the story of Gilmore’s murder/s that Mailer tells, then that 
 essence must be dilation. The story does not get reduced to the “facts,” it 
 outgrows them rapidly. 
 
 Let us return for a moment to that proposition of W. H. Auden’s that 
 murder is “unique in that it abolishes the party it injures” and “is the one 
 crime in which society has a direct interest.” 42 Society takes a “direct 
 interest” because it must “demand atonement” or “grant forgiveness” on 
 behalf of the vanished victim. That “direct interest” arises, necessarily, 
 as supposition and presumption. The death of the victim, the fact that 
 murder often occurs without witnesses, and the ambiguous status of the 
 murderer’s recollection of motive and event are factors that make the 
 account of murder extraordinarily opaque. And yet there must be an 
 account. Murder fascinates, and its ambiguity —the mystery at the heart 
 of murder— is not merely an effect of the factual unreliability of individ¬ 
 ual accounts of murder. Like all tales of death, the narrative of murder is 
 freighted with a kind of aw r ed bafflement at something visceral, yet in¬ 
 scrutable. As Wendy Lesser has so aptly written, “Our death, which is 
 intended for us alone, is the one experience in our life we can’t directly 
 experience.” 43 Leaving aside for one moment what problems there may 
 be with the concept of “direct experience” here, we can see that the 
 beguiling paradox described by Lesser is enhanced in the tale of murder. 
 Her formulation of the phrase recalls an earlier proposition that “a story 
 about murder ... is also, obliquely, a story about the existence or absence 
 of God.” 44 There is no marker for human mortality but the divine. Lesser 
 herself proves that. Despite her obviously secular analysis, the insertion 
 of the w r ord “intended” gives an oddly divine ring to the first quote above. 
 We all must die. But is there a God to decree that death? Time’s immola¬ 
 tion is as coincidental as it is inevitable: a slow r wearing-dowm of the flesh. 
 Death is no agent, merely a biological (and a metaphysical) certainty. Yet 
 the tale of murder contains both death as event and death as agency. 
 Death has a presence — however confused, humble, or maniacal —in the 
 figure of the murderer. It is that metaphysical investment in the murderer 
 
 202 Murder 
 
that explains his or her dominant position in the narrative of murder: his 
 or her body, his or her psyche is the trail down which death comes. 
 
 In Cormac McCarthy’s recent novel, All the Pretty Horses, the two pro¬ 
 tagonists witness a peremptory execution. While they are en route from 
 one jail to another, the boys’ captors take one of the company to a stand of 
 trees and there, with singular dispatch, shoot him. In the passage describ¬ 
 ing the survivors’ meeting with the officer who had been in charge of the 
 killing, the reader is positioned, with the prisoners, at an insurmountable 
 distance from their captor. On top of the difference of culture, and of 
 relative power, there is an idiosyncratic but vital distinction: the irrevoca¬ 
 ble act of murder that has severed the killer from the world, even that of 
 the murder’s witnesses. McCarthy writes: 
 
 The captain inhabited another space and it was a space of his own election and 
 outside the common world of men. A space privileged to men of the irreclaimable 
 act which while it contained all lesser worlds within it contained no access to 
 them. For the terms of election were of a piece with its office and once chosen that 
 world could not be quit. 45 
 
 This is an almost perfect inscription of the mystery of murder. He who 
 inhabits the “space privileged to men of the irreclaimable act” is linked by 
 the history, effectively, of another person (the murderer before the murder) 
 to the world they have left. It is this problematic transition of one who has 
 not killed to one who has that defines irrevocability in the discourse of 
 murder. Not only is the victim abolished, but so, too, is the one who has 
 not killed. At this paradoxical border the whole imperative of murder’s 
 origin arises. How does one explain the murderer (and therefore tell the 
 story of the murder) when his or her history is that of another person: the 
 one who has not killed ? That demarcation is visible in Lionel Dahmer’s 
 horrified statement that his son’s “childhood no longer exists.” Although 
 Dahmer goes on to say of his son that “everything is now a part of what he 
 did as a man,” the murderer’s colonization of the past before the murders 
 cannot be complete. The elder Dahmer attempts to invoke the integrity 
 (meaning the difference) of the Jeff he knew as his son before the revelation 
 of the horrors in apartment 213. That obligation to remember his son is 
 opposed by as weighty an obligation to confront the murderer. A Father's 
 Story is about precisely this struggle, and its inevitable failure. The site 
 of that struggle is the collision of “Jeff” and the murderer, “Jeffrey 
 
 The Cast in Order of Disappearance 203 
 
Dahmer” — a collision the force of which is measured by Lionel Dahmer’s 
 deflection of guilt onto himself. The link of son and murderer is, there¬ 
 fore, a device. Dahmer cannot unite the two “truths,” and he sets himself 
 at the place of their meeting to make traversable (and intelligible) that 
 border. 
 
 The search for murder’s origin would seem to be the unifying impulse 
 of all murder narratives, whether legal, psychoanalytic, “literary,” or ge¬ 
 neric. That search is equally an obligation upon the counternarrative of 
 murder, although the difference of both means and ends defines its status 
 as countemarrative. Bridging the paradoxical border of the one-who-has- 
 not-yet-killed and the murderer requires a definite re-Authoring of the 
 crime. In Chapter Three I demonstrated how the “high literature of true 
 crime” of Fredric Wertham and Curtis Bok proposed a social origin for 
 the individual violent acts they studied. That social context could be 
 provided, however, only via a thorough investigation of the murderer’s 
 psyche — an investigation which entailed a reinvention of the murderous 
 subject. That reinvention — achieved by the intervention of the analyst 
 or lawyer and his drawing out the meaning of the murder from the 
 accused — appeared to foreground the murderer as authoritative subject, 
 w'hile actually foregrounding the authority of the analyst. 
 
 The issue of A/authority in the tale of murder is therefore more com¬ 
 plicated than the concept of “identification” can suggest. The identifica¬ 
 tion of author and murderer (or that of vicarious reader with the figure of 
 the murderer) is something of a trick. The reader identifies with th t figure 
 of the murderer, remaining always at a sufficient remove (theoretically) to 
 maintain an ethical position on the crime while aesthetically appreciating 
 it. The identity 7 of author and murderous subject is more complicated. 
 Janet Malcolm would argue that that “identity” is strategic, allowing the 
 pecuniary-minded author access to the perspective of the murderer for 
 the profit of his or her text. 46 The integrity of the subject and that of the 
 journalistic contract are sacrificed for the (false) integrity of the text es¬ 
 tablished under the terms of such a claim to identity. While Malcolm’s 
 point of view 7 as a watchdog of journalistic ethics is laudable, it is also 
 rather one-dimensional. In the instance of the actual murderer finding a 
 mediator for his or her story— whether an author, a psychoanalyst, or a 
 lawyer — the person who mediates the tale of murder establishes identity 7 
 with the subject at the fault line of the other’s subjectivity as murderer. 
 
 204 Murder 
 
The Author in the tale of murder arises at the place of greatest uncer¬ 
 tainty: at the point where the murderer exists unexplained, his or her new 
 identity as murderer unconnected to the past before the killing. Regard¬ 
 less of the project of the particular tale of murder (to classify the pathology 
 of the killer, to provide his or her defense, to write the “definitive” ac¬ 
 count of the crime and trial), the business of the author is to bridge that 
 paradoxical border. Under such conditions, there can be no definitive tale 
 of a given murder. Versions do not necessarily even succeed one another 
 but coexist in complement or opposition. Every tale of murder arises in 
 and on uncertainty, and no definitive tale can exist. 
 
 In two of the most renowned nonfiction novels about murder, The Execu¬ 
 tioner's Song by Norman Mailer and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, the 
 author’s literal presence is shadowy. In The Executioner's Song, Larry 
 Schiller —the entrepreneur gathering the rights to Gilmore’s story — 
 performs the function of the actual author of the story, Mailer. Capote’s 
 presence in his text is veiled, generic; he becomes “The Journalist” on 
 those occasions when he must make overt his presence as narrator. How¬ 
 ever coded the presence of the author, and however scrupulous the docu¬ 
 mentary evidence that forms the basis of both works, the A/authority of 
 Mailer and Capote seems solid. But the case of In Cold Blood is peculiar. 
 There is an authorial presence that Capote, “The Journalist,” erases. 
 Unlike Mailer, who completed many of the interviews for The Execu¬ 
 tioner's Song himself, Capote was less than comfortable in his role as 
 researcher in Holcombe, Kansas. Much of that research was done by 
 Harper Lee, and it was she who did the “people work” from out of which 
 comes much of the finely worked portraiture that makes In Cold Blood so 
 affecting. 47 In Mailer’s work, the wraiths are not veiled: they speak out in 
 the exact meter and nuance of the voices bequeathed in tapes and letters 
 to the author. However, those “actual” voices exist only by virtue of the 
 narrative appetite of both the author and his surrogate in the text. Nei¬ 
 ther Mailer nor Capote makes naive claims to tell the truth of “what 
 happened,” unlike the true crime writers (or the publisher’s blurbs) that 
 promise definitive, “true,” and “uncut” accounts. It is not the documen¬ 
 tary nature of the texts but the status of fiction that grants these two novels 
 their explanatory power. 
 
 For Mailer and Capote the axis of affectdvity in the text is the transition 
 
 The Cast in Order of Disappearance 205 
 
of murderer into victim enacted by the execution. While both authors 
 successfully preserve the identity of the murderer in the face of that meta¬ 
 morphosis, 48 the price of that supposed integrity is the elision of his 
 character “other than as a murderer.” The double bind obliged by the 
 backwards narrative in the tale of murder is inescapable. The preserva¬ 
 tion of the figure of the murderer at the point at which he himself be¬ 
 comes a victim is achieved by the dominance, overall, of the story of the 
 murderer’s genesis. The “tainted” innocence that is the murderer before 
 he has killed forms a narrative counterweight to the guilty innocent about 
 to be executed by the state. 
 
 The “becoming” of the murderer forms a large part of both novels, al¬ 
 though In Cold Blood more closely follows the generic tradition by initiat¬ 
 ing the search for murder’s origin in the latter part of the book (through 
 the lens of forensic psychiatry). Mailer’s search for the origins of Gil¬ 
 more’s murderousness even extends beyond the text, a curiosity that can 
 be read, inferentially, from the published selection of letters Mailer re¬ 
 ceived from Jack Henry Abbott in prison. Abbott’s replies are long and 
 thoughtful, but we cannot tell from the book what questions and prompts 
 from Mailer Mr. Abbott is responding to. And yet the substance of the 
 conversation remains: How did you get here? How has imprisonment changed 
 you? The story of Abbott’s mental and physical demolition at the hands of 
 the correctional authorities is much like Gilmore’s. Both had to bear long 
 periods of isolation and the more deadly assault of antipsychotic drugs 
 like Prolixin. Both were “recidivists” who, since adolescence, had spent 
 only a few months out of prison. Abbott is one of the wraiths in The 
 Executioner's Song. Despite Mailer’s contention “the two men could not be 
 more different,” 49 Abbott stands in the place of the Gilmore who died 
 before Mailer could ever meet him. 50 
 
 The context within which Mailer and Capote set about placing the 
 figure of the murderer is topological. The “character of the murderer” 
 represented by Gilmore, Hickock, or Smith, exists in apposite rela¬ 
 tion both to their own prior innocence and to the murderousness of 
 others, whether the “organized” or “disorganized” psychoses of the “se¬ 
 rial killer” or a more ordinary fury and frustration that leads daily to 
 murder. Mailer’s topology 7 continually refers back to the institutions that 
 produce the machismo of the “good con” — one who can be both spir¬ 
 itually and physically demolished, yet survive: 
 
 206 Murder 
 
Here in prison the most respected and honored men among us are those who have 
 killed other men, particularly other prisoners. It is not merely fear, but respect. 
 
 Everyone in prison has an ideal of violence, murder. Beneath all relationships 
 between prisoners ... is the ever-present fact of murder. It ultimately defines our 
 relationship among ourselves. 51 
 
 Correctional institutions culture violence in administrators and wards 
 alike, and the news media —implicated both in the operations of due 
 process and in regenerating narratives of murder — provide the wider 
 stage upon which that violence plays. Gilmore’s murderousness can be¬ 
 come intelligible, can be understood in its full horror, only in the context 
 of the topology of indifference and violence to which it belongs. 
 
 In Capote’s work, the topology to which Hickock and Smith belong is a 
 simpler one than Mailer’s; indeed, it forms a kind of a distinct set: those 
 men who make up the small community of the condemned on death row. 
 Capote remained fascinated by that typology of murder long after his 
 completion of In Cold Blood. He interviewed and corresponded with con¬ 
 victed and condemned murderers throughout his career, 52 and although 
 the focus of his interest seemed to be the convicted murderer, Capote did 
 produce a second “nonfiction” account of a set of murders twenty years 
 after In Cold BloodP Like In Cold Blood , the genius of “Handcarved Cof¬ 
 fins” lies in its evocation of place and character; unlike it, there is no 
 getting near to the murderer who, in escaping detection but not suspi¬ 
 cion, cannot seem to fill the figural space of the murderer. The crimes 
 remain a mystery, beautifully achieved, but not anchored in meaning by 
 origin. What sense there is in Capote’s topology of murder comes from 
 his rendering of its constituent parts, his faith in the relation of each 
 oddity, each coincidence, each particularity, to its other. 
 
 Capote was fascinated by the signifying quality of idiosyncratic detail. 
 In the grip of that enthusiasm he was quite capable of overlooking the 
 casual function of the signs he sought to interpret in the context of the 
 tale of murder. When interviewing Robert Beausoleil in his cell in San 
 Quentin, Capote veered from the subject of conversation, distracted by 
 the bare chest Beausoleil had just revealed. He mused aloud: “It’s odd 
 about tattoos. I’ve talked to several hundred men convicted of homi¬ 
 cide — multiple homicide, in most cases. The only common denominator 
 I could find among them was tattoos. A good eighty percent of them 
 
 The Cast in Order of Disappearance 207 
 
were heavily tattooed. Richard Speck. York and Latham. Smith and 
 Hickock.” 54 To find a “common denominator” among murderers in their 
 tattoos is hopeful, if not downright naive. Capote would likely have found 
 tattoos ubiquitous in the general prison population, the amount of tattoo¬ 
 ing determined by the length of sentence. Tattoos form a part of prison 
 culture, as well as signaling other class, work, or subcultural identities. 
 Deeply immersed in his catalogue of killers, Capote has forgotten the 
 institutional limits of the topology he describes. 
 
 The topological approach, even as subtly worked as it is in Mailer’s 
 hands, tends to award to the figure of the murderer both particularity and 
 the potential to explicate the generalities of murderous violence. In the 
 generic tale of murder — even in these self-reflexive nonfictions — the fig¬ 
 ure of the murderer is synecdochic. As the focal point of the story, the 
 murderer stands always in reference to the meaning assigned to his act: by 
 statute, by the courts, by the community, by the media. Yet the meaning 
 assigned to the act itself arises from and about the murderer, who is the 
 one apparently firm place on the shifting ground of the tale of murder. 
 The figure of the murderer refers back continually to other murderers. 
 His or her particularity is a ruse. Much more important is his or her 
 supposed power to tell us something generally about murder. People lis¬ 
 ten closely to the tale of murder — so much of which is banal detail — and 
 hear a mystery. A tale full of ciphers. 
 
 Telling Tales of Murder 
 
 Once upon a time, when I was a younger woman, I met — coincidentally, 
 as one does — someone whom I instantly liked and, not much later, crazily 
 loved. She was, like my father, an ex-Catholic and, also like my father, was 
 born the last of several generations local to the area. While coincidence 
 does not ordinarily lead to much, in this case it did. My lover’s father, it 
 turned out, had been in the same class as my father at Old St. Joseph’s. 
 After my father was expelled from there, and had escaped the approbation 
 of police and priests, their paths crossed again when they took up posi¬ 
 tions in the same division of a government department. The two young 
 men became casual drinking buddies, and my father admired the beauty 
 of the woman Dan was dating, and would later marry. Constance had 
 
 208 Murder 
 
inherited her mother’s beauty, but not much else from parents as remote 
 from her as is Pluto from the Sun. 
 
 Con didn’t have much to say to her parents, nor they to her. In that 
 household the focal point of any conversation was the cat. While Con and 
 I were together, she didn’t visit home much, content instead to endure the 
 weekly phone calls in which her mother would tell stories about the cat, 
 or complain about not being able to understand the window locks. Con 
 would raise her eyes heavenward, her tongue thick with the desire to tell 
 her mother to shut up. 
 
 Unlike Con and her parents, members of our family talked regularly to 
 one another, although strangers observed that we did so simultaneously, 
 with much arm-waving. Dad and I could talk quietly, catching up, as he 
 drove me down to the train station at the end of my visit. It was on one of 
 these short car rides that he told me about the confidence imparted to 
 him once by Dan, when drunk. Dan, a taciturn man, was driven to talk 
 only partly by drink. He and my father had both just extracted themselves 
 from a car wreck, and Dan may have been feeling sentimental. At any 
 rate, he told my father that he’d once killed a man — had drowned an Arab 
 trader in a barrel of oil because of an “overpriced” trinket. There were 
 three of them, soldiers in New Zealand’s Second Expeditionary Force, 
 abroad for the first time in their short lives. 
 
 After my father told me this story, I stepped out into the drizzling 
 autumnal day to await my train. 
 
 I wondered why Dan had confessed such a thing to my father. If he 
 knew him at all, he’d have known that Ray would despise him for it. 
 Perhaps Dan had not told this story as blithely as my father seemed to 
 suggest he had. Or should Dan’s confession not be considered as a con¬ 
 fession to murder, but merely a “war story,” re-creating an act of in¬ 
 difference or, more pointedly, of racist “superiority” (the “colonists” 
 abroad) — an “adventure” sanctioned by circumstance? Certainly, the vic¬ 
 tim in the story (and maybe even the story itself) seems dispensable, 
 almost throwaway. (For, after all, is there not something careless, flippant 
 about the mode of the killing: to drown someone in a barrel of oil}) I do 
 not now think that Dan would have spoken with such drunken largesse if 
 the man he had drowned had not been an Arab. 
 
 And then I wondered why my father had told me the story. Maybe he 
 offered me the story to help explain why Con’s relationship with her 
 
 The Cast in Order of Disappearance 209 
 
parents was so unlike our own. But that assumed she knew what her father 
 had done, which I doubted. To me it was unnecessary detail, unassimil- 
 able, a fact I could not organize into the overall story of my loving Con. 
 
 Over the following days, I tried hard to ignore the story of the mur¬ 
 dered Arab. I had decided, after all, that it bore no relevance to our 
 relationship, that knowing the fact could be no benefit to Con. But the 
 nature of the story —as it had always been —was such that I was finally 
 compelled to tell it, to pass on the anomaly in the hope of making some 
 sense of it. It was a cruel thing to do, because the burden of sense could 
 only fall on Con, could register only in confusion and silence. The story 
 carried within it the unfulfillable promise of a revelation. Con’s coolness 
 toward her father was formed out of habit, out of familiarity, out of 
 indifference. Con found it impossible to react to this new piece of infor¬ 
 mation about her father. The story went round her, past her, under her — 
 like cloven water that seals, seamless, behind the ship that has broken it. 
 The difference it made to her I could not fathom, but the difference it 
 made to me was obvious: I was guilty of telling a story for the sake of the 
 story alone. 
 
 She who tells the tale of murder is telling, inevitably, the story of her 
 own “finer feelings.” That vanity —the affective power of a conscien¬ 
 tiously told tale of murder —means that the definition of a well-told tale 
 is not its “truth,” nor even its strength as a moral fable, but how well one 
 signals one’s own pity 7 (and, thereby, the pity 7 of others). I told Con the 
 story of her father’s murderousness more to say something about myself 
 than about him. For I knew myself in the telling of the tale much better 
 than I knew its subject. In telling on Dan I was defining my difference from 
 him, while also positioning myself in alliance with Con, to whom I was 
 confiding. While the impulse to lay bare and to exercise those “finer 
 feelings” may not hold true for some of the more tabloid forms of true 
 crime, it is certainly true of the more finely worked pieces of true crime 
 writing. The sensibility of the author is the measure by which both the 
 literal insensibility of the corpse and the metaphorical insensibility of 
 the murderer are thrown into relief. The foregrounding of the figure of 
 the murderer can occur only through his or her being reauthored — 
 by the sensitivity of the analyst’s diagnosis, the writer’s art, the lawyers 
 understanding of justice and human weakness. 
 
 The sensibility of the author in the tale of murder w 7 as the first thing to 
 
 210 Murder 
 
fascinate me about narratives of murder. My own sense of pity, mirroring 
 that of the author, appalled me. The sensibility of the author — compris¬ 
 ing in equal measure pity, regret, and horror— was clearly signaled to me 
 by two quite different tales of murder as execution. The implicatedness of 
 the observers struck me in George Orwell’s essay “The Hanging” 55 and in 
 the closing scenes of Richard Brooks’s film version of In Cold Blood. Or¬ 
 well and Capote both acted as witnesses at the execution. Their revulsion 
 at the scene of death was the sum, therefore, of their empathy, their 
 outrage, and their guilt. 
 
 At twelve years old, reading “The Hanging,” I remember the impact of 
 Orwell’s description of the prisoner’s walk to the gallows. It had rained 
 the night before, and the pitted ground of the prison yard was covered 
 with water. As he was led across the yard, the condemned man stepped 
 aside from a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet. This fastidiousness 
 seemed bizarre and unintelligible. What was so frightening about this 
 scene was its portrayal of the very tenacity of life; its dumb, habitual, 
 unconscious willfulness. 56 
 
 Not long after reading Orwell, I watched In Cold Blood on the Saturday 
 night tv feature. Richard Brooks had faithfully rendered the atmosphere 
 of Capote’s nonfiction novel: a feeling of dread and, simultaneously, of 
 regret. When Hickock and Smith are taken by car to the building where 
 the gallows are erected, we see the black sedan enter the prefab, rainwater 
 running in thick rivulets from the gleaming hood of the car. Overhead, 
 rain drums on the corrugated-iron roof. I remember wondering what it 
 would be like to meet one’s scheduled death in the rain, which spoke so 
 loudly of life. In both readings, my shock seemed a good measure of the 
 intention of the author (or, in Brooks’s case, of the director’s faithfulness 
 to Capote’s sense of affect) to convey his own horror and bafflement. Like 
 them, I was fascinated by my own morbid attention to detail in the death 
 scene, the depth or shallowness of my empathy for the condemned, the 
 affective power of the execution. That fascination is produced by the sud¬ 
 den awareness of one’s own senses: I have oudived the subject of the tale. 
 One is witness to a death that seems to bequeath to the survivor a greater 
 portion of life, however confounding that inheritance may be. 
 
 In A Father’s Story Lionel Dahmer writes of the thousands of letters 
 directed to his son in prison, letters which he collected and read on 
 Jeffrey’s behalf. Fan mail directed to the famous and infamous alike seems 
 
 The Cast in Order of Disappearance 211 
 
to indicate a need in the sender to relate his or her own everyday setbacks 
 and miseries (which have no limit on depth merely because they are 
 ordinary) to the extraordinary grandeur or horror of others’ lives. The 
 letters directed to a murderer, though, carry an even greater freight of 
 hopelessness: the burden of a confused desire for recognition from the 
 person to whom the confession is made. In that recognition is sought 
 redemption. Many of the letters directed to Jeffrey Dahmer seemed, in 
 his father’s words, “to embrace ... the whole vast sadness of the world”: 
 
 “I know what it’s like to be lonely,” one woman wrote. “My husband was my whole 
 world, and when he died, I wanted to go with him.” Letter after letter formed a 
 long chain of immemorial complaint: “My fiance is an alcoholic.” “I’ve just bro¬ 
 ken up with my boyfriend.” “I get dizzy spells.” “I am on Dilantin for my epi¬ 
 lepsy.” “I have this problem with my husband....” “No one likes my music.” “No 
 one understands me.” “No one cares.” “Sometimes all I feel is hate.” 
 
 Some of these letters clearly deepened into grave emotional distress: “When I 
 go to sleep, I die,” wrote one woman. “I feel so miserable, I just don’t care,” said 
 another. To these were added dozens of similar complaints: “I can’t sleep any¬ 
 more”; “I am always shaking”; “I feel so lost”; “I feel so numb”; “I seem so 
 negative all the time”; “I am so limited .” 57 
 
 The murderer is an emissary of mortality itself. All of the half-promises 
 and prevarications of mortality live in the murderer. For the hopeful, the 
 murderer is both an oracle of a God to whom they are subject but do not 
 understand and the staunchest enemy of that God. Here the minor and 
 major miseries of the readers’ lives are offered up in the context of greater 
 cruelties, greater mysteries. The tale of murder — which makes so much 
 of detail — seeks to make the prosaic mysterious. Portent inevitably re¬ 
 minds the reader both of chance and fate. Their lives are not in their own 
 hands; they have not failed. Contradictory and coexistent, chance and fate 
 in the tale of murder measure mortality, in all its possibility, always 
 foreclosed. 
 
 Responding to an earlier version of this work, a reader gendy pointed out 
 that, for all the laudable insights of the overall critique, I had failed to 
 work out my own position on the tale of murder; that is to say, I had not 
 sketched a means by which some of the worst generic impulses could be 
 avoided. Perhaps, in reply to that, I can only cite the means (and end) by 
 
 212 Murder 
 
which this argument resolves itself: with a confession, a guilt-inflected 
 version of Baldwin’s, Millett’s, or Dahmer’s “witnessing.” Their tales of 
 murder might be termed a “better,” wiser, or more compassionate re¬ 
 sponse to murder than that of the earlier writers examined here. Al¬ 
 though neither compassion nor imagination are modern inventions, the 
 recent history of race, class, and gender activism (not to mention its rich 
 accompaniment in theory) has cut out a space within which the “mar¬ 
 ginal” can contest their position at the limits, defined by the interests, 
 material and epistemological, of others. Such a contest, quite apart from 
 its immediate aims, tends to throw “authority” into doubt —asking what 
 the power to speak actually means. Indeed, if “death is both superlatively 
 real and superlatively tropic,” as Elisabeth Bronfen would have it, then 
 death does have an agent, has specific interests, works against some and 
 for others. 58 What is distinctive about the works of Baldwin, Millett, and 
 Dahmer is the way in which the authors are present in the text, as if they 
 themselves were ghosts, sent to testify for the silenced dead. Capote, 
 present at the execution of Hickock and Smith, for whom he unques¬ 
 tionably felt compassion and, certainly in the latter’s case, sympathy, 
 somehow betrays that presence by recalling himself in the text only as a 
 generic witness. He is not there; a reporter is there. Orwell, on the other 
 hand, testifies to the hanging he witnesses: his is a conscientious, self- 
 conscious, and implicated presence. The later writers, Baldwin, Millett, 
 and Imbrie, also testify. Theirs is a witnessing. And that, indeed, is what I 
 must nominate as a “fitting” way of writing about murder. 
 
 But, for all that such witnessing is fitting, it is also rare. It is the mur¬ 
 derer that remains at the center of the tale of murder, a tale told by the 
 living to bring death, the spectral visitor, into their presence. It is a tale in 
 which death’s usually blind agency has a face, a name, and a life all its own 
 in the figure of the murderer. Dennis Nilsen, murderer, once quipped 
 that a miniseries about his crimes ought to credit its cast “in order of 
 disappearance.” 59 Sadly, in the tale of murder it is the figure of the mur¬ 
 derer that is the last to disappear. 
 
 The Cast in Order of Disappearance 213 
 

 
 
 
Appendix: 
 
 Varying Accounts of the Murder of Janet Fay 
 
 Statement of Martha Beck 
 
 Janet Fay had accompanied Ray, her fiance, and his “sister,” Martha, to 
 their house at 15 Adeline Place. Ray was sleeping on the couch in the 
 living room and Martha and Janet took the bed. Janet was talkative all 
 night, asking questions of Martha. Around three or four in the morning 
 she asked for a telephone book, saying she wanted to look up her dead 
 husband’s sister who lived in New York. Discouraged from that, she got 
 agitated about the checks she’d signed over to Fernandez the evening 
 before. “Fed up,” Martha went into the living room and told Ray, “For 
 God’s sake, give this woman back her checks and take her to the train and 
 send her back to Albany.” Worried, Mrs. Fay said she didn’t want to go, 
 but didn’t know what she did want. She was agitated and rambling. Ray 
 said to Martha “in an undertone,” “We have to get her quiet.” Martha 
 told Janet to go back to bed and Janet retorted in offense, “Are you being 
 paid to make that remark?” The two then argued, Janet accusing Martha 
 of “telling Ray what to do” and Martha accusing her of being “jealous of 
 his sister.” Janet said Ray was “soon to be her husband” and when he was 
 they wouldn’t want Martha living with them. Ray, tired of this fussing, 
 “jumped up” and told Martha to “get her quiet” and left the room for the 
 bathroom. Janet began to rummage in her suitcase on the floor and, 
 taking the hammer that was lying on the armchair (it had been used to 
 tack up some pictures) Martha hit Janet Fay on the head and “she fell kind 
 of sideways . . . still moaning.” Ray then reentered the room and “took 
 her by the throat and tried to choke her,” but this was ineffective as she 
 
was still moaning and bleeding. So Martha handed Ray her scarf from the 
 chair, and he used the hammer to twist it tight about her neck. 1 
 
 Revised Statement of Martha Beck 
 
 In her revised statement, 2 Martha allegedly told the visiting New York 
 authorities that although she was “signing her own death warrant” she 
 must “tell the exact truth.” The significant changes in the earlier story 
 were her admission that Ray brought the hammer in not to tack up 
 pictures but because they “may have trouble tonight.” When the argu¬ 
 ment in the early hours of the morning occurred, Martha hid the hammer 
 in the sleeve of her housecoat. She held it out to Ray, but he said, “No, 
 you have got to do it.” She said she didn’t want to and Ray replied, “If you 
 love me, you will do it.” “And that is when I hit her.” This second account 
 both placed Fernandez in the room at the time of the murder and gave 
 evidence of premeditation. For those reasons, it formed the heart of the 
 prosecution’s account, for it refuted both the insanity defense and the 
 claim that Ray was merely an accessory' after the fact. 3 
 
 Statement of Ray 7 Fernandez 
 
 Fernandez told the Michigan authorities that Mrs. Fay had come into the 
 living room in the early hours of the morning of 4 January, “wanting to be 
 near” him. He told her to go back to bed and she did, only to return 
 minutes later worried about her money. Hearing her “whimpering,” Fer¬ 
 nandez got angiy and left the living room. In the bedroom Martha told 
 him Fay had been worrying about her money. Returning to the living 
 room, Fernandez assured Fay that her checks were safe in his coat pocket. 
 She was not comforted. Ray again left the room, after saying to Martha, 
 “See if you can keep that woman quiet, no matter how it is.” When he 
 returned, “she had kept her quiet by hitting her on the head with a 
 hammer.” Seeing the moaning and bleeding Fay, Ray 7 picked up the rem¬ 
 nants of the bottle of whiskey in the cabinet and downed it. Fernandez 
 then “helped” Martha, as she said they had to “finish it.” He put Martha’s 
 white scarf around her neck and tightened it with the hammer. 4 
 
 216 Appendix 
 
Testimony of Ray Fernandez 
 
 On the stand Fernandez recanted his earlier statement. Janet Fay had 
 kept him up the night previous to that on which the murder occurred. 
 She had “wanted some loving” and he had reluctantly obliged. Fernandez 
 “hugged her, kissed her, caressed her and most everything” while, not a 
 few feet away on the bed, Martha lay silent, possibly asleep and possibly 
 not. After this session, Mrs. Fay would pass him by on the couch every so 
 often and “just touch me.” On the morning of the murder, Mrs. Fay was 
 also needing affection but Fernandez was “in no mood for it.” Fler “wor¬ 
 rying about her money” was merely an excuse for her to leave Martha in 
 the bedroom and be near him. Annoyed with her incessant advances, 
 Fernandez went into the bathroom, returning in time to see Mrs. Fay 
 crouched over her suitcase, which was full of blood. Standing over her, 
 Martha seemed to be in something of a daze: “just looking down at Mrs. 
 Fay and no movement.” When Fernandez exclaimed “Martha, what has 
 happened?” she only looked down in shock, echoing him: “My God . . . 
 what has happened?” Ray began to stutter about a hospital or a doctor or 
 something, but Martha, feeling for a pulse, said it was “too late.” Fer¬ 
 nandez strenuously denied using a hammer to tighten the scarf that stran¬ 
 gled Fay. He said he’d seen no hammer, although he admitted he owned 
 one. The strangling incident in both his and Martha’s testimony became 
 merely an attempt to staunch the flow of cranial blood that was ruining 
 the carpet. 5 
 
 Testimony of Martha Beck 
 
 On the stand, Martha enlarged upon Ray’s version of the murder. Mrs. 
 Fay had been very needy, soliciting the sexual attention of Fernandez on 
 both of the nights before the murder as well as the night it occurred. 
 Martha, pretending to be asleep, overheard Mrs. Fay’s attempts to seduce 
 Ray, and his justifications for the lack of response. Mrs. Fay had appar¬ 
 ently “reached in the neck of her slip and pulled out a wrinkled, shriveled- 
 up old breast [saying] ‘Don’t oo want some sugar, honeychile,’ ” Ray told 
 her then that “he would give her plenty of loving after the marriage, but 
 not before.” 6 The next night, Mrs. Fay made a similar sexual foray, with 
 
 Appendix 217 
 
better results. As Martha dozed, she heard the couple go and sit on the 
 chair by the window, where “there was some talk and mumbling” until 
 she slept. On the morning of the murder, Mrs. Fay was once again rest¬ 
 less. After one of her visits to the living room, where Ray was trying to 
 sleep, she told Martha that she was worried about all the money in the 
 house. But her conversation soon diverted to the matter of Ray and her 
 anxiety about whether he’d “ever had an intercourse” or “would she have 
 to show him.” Following this conversation, Mrs. Fay went back into the 
 living room, and from there to the bathroom. While she was gone, Ray 
 came through to the bedroom and asked what Martha had been saying to 
 the older woman. After a while, he came in again, flustered. “My God, 
 Martha,” he said, “that woman wants to be screwed!” He asked Martha to 
 go and talk to Janet and try to get her back to bed. In the living room, 
 Martha surprised Janet, lying naked on the couch and “expecting Ray to 
 come in,” as she put it. Martha told her, “For a woman of your age, you’re 
 the hottest bitch I have ever seen.” Janet then “rushed toward me and 
 drew back her fist and slapped me. At the same time she slapped me she 
 said: ‘Are you being paid to make that remark?”’ Beyond that, Martha 
 could remember nothing, until she was shaken by Fernandez and found 
 herself staring at the body slumped over a suitcase that was rapidly filling 
 with blood. Martha did not mention the hammer —it seemed to vanish in 
 the dry well of her memory. 
 
 Martha’s attorney brought out on direct that it was not only Janet Fay 
 whose advances were rebuffed on the morning of the murder. Martha also 
 went to bed “hurt and angry.” 7 The remainder of her account followed 
 Fernandez’s closely. Martha also insisted that Janet was dead before Ray 
 began to strangle her with the scarf (or apply the “torniquet”). 8 
 
 The State 
 
 The version of the murder that the prosecution adhered to was that of the 
 defendants’ statements elicited in Michigan “before they had a chance to 
 plan together a defense.” 9 This was the version apparendy solicited 
 from Martha Beck by the state’s psychiatrist, Perry Lichtenstein. 10 After 
 Fernandez had conned Mrs. Fay into signing over her bank checks to 
 
 218 Appendix 
 
them, the household settled down. Fernandez, anticipating trouble, had 
 brought the hammer up from the set of tools in the car. Mrs. Fay kept 
 Martha awake with her worries about the money, and when Fay tried to 
 solicit from Ray some assurances that everything was all right he be¬ 
 came annoyed with her, instructing Martha — who would do anything for 
 him — to “keep her quiet, no matter how.” Thus it was that Martha struck 
 the elderly woman several times on the head with the ball-peen hammer. 
 When Fernandez returned to the room, Janet Fay was still alive, “bleed¬ 
 ing and moaning,” and Fernandez cut short those moans by strangling 
 her. 11 Realizing she was finally dead, the couple took “that old woman and 
 they tie her up . . . put her knees up against her chest and her feet up 
 against her buttocks and they wrap her up as you probably wrap a cat that 
 has been killed, and [they] throw her in the closet,” but not before Martha 
 had stolen her jewelry. Then, because the body wouldn’t fit in the trunk 
 they had, Beck and Fernandez went to buy a bigger trunk. While out, 
 they popped in to the bank in Jamaica, Queens, to open a deposit account 
 with Mrs. Fay’s money. 12 
 
 The Defense 
 
 The defense stuck to the testimony of the principals, purged of the more 
 confronting and offensive details. It is the one version where the actual 
 event of murder appears only briefly. It is the merest of subplots, rather 
 than the culmination of the drama. Rosenberg told the jury: “When she 
 got into this argument with Mrs. Fay, when she saw Mrs. Fay nude on 
 that couch, she went into a whirlpool, a blind fury. She didn’t know what 
 
 happened_[T]he only thing she remembered after that, there was Mrs. 
 
 Fay bent over bleeding and dead.” 13 For the defense the account of 
 murder is, in fact, an accounting of the murderers. The defense strategy 
 was to demonstrate the lack of responsibility of both defendants for the 
 murder —one being literally, and the other figuratively, absent. The mur¬ 
 derers are not present at the murder, but they are everywhere else. Such 
 a displacement is ironic. The defense account of murder explodes the 
 frame of narrative that, in all the previous accounts, reduces murder to a 
 moment. The later tale of murder spun by true crime writers would — if 
 
 Appendix 219 
 
any attempt at accuracy was made — detail the events listed by the pros¬ 
 ecution, but the actual story would be found in the meaning imputed by 
 the defense to those events. 
 
 Martha Beck’s 1951 Signed Statement 
 
 Shordy before the execution, Martha gave the psychiatrist who’d testified 
 for the defense a quite different account of the Fay murder. She wrote 
 that Ray intervened when Mrs. Fay slapped her, to prevent a “free-for- 
 all.” Martha “left the room crying” and returned when she heard a 
 “frightened” call from Ray: 
 
 Ray was standing over Mrs. Fay with both hands around her neck. Blood was 
 flowing all over the place from her head and she was moaning faintly. I ran over to 
 him and said, “My God, Ray, stop that!” He said, “This moaning is driving me 
 crazy!” With those words he dropped her head back on the floor and jerked a neck 
 scarf off a chair and put it around her neck. He put the hammer in the knot and 
 tightened it.... [H]e told me to hold the hammer. I said “Why? She’s dead. Why 
 did you kill her?” Then and only then do I believe that he knew what he had done 
 because he sat down on the couch and said, “My God! My God! What have I 
 done?” 14 
 
 Dr. Hoffmann indicated that Martha had taken the blame on herself 
 because she was afraid of Fernandez — a fear that impelled her to act as an 
 accessory to murder. 
 
 220 Appendix 
 
Notes 
 
 Introduction 
 
 1. See Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry into the Subject of 
 Murder (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 93-120. 
 
 2. See U.S. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 
 1995, 115th ed. (Washington, D.C.: gpo, 1996), tables 125-128,133. 
 
 3. David Brion Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860: A Study in 
 Social Values (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957). 
 
 4. Bill Ellis, “Death by Folklore: Ostension, Contemporary Legend and Mur¬ 
 der,” Western Folklore 48 (July 1989); Joel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study 
 in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni¬ 
 versity Press, 1991). 
 
 5. Fredric Wertham, The Show of Violence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1949). 
 
 6. Willard Motley, Knock on Any Door (New York: Appleton-Century, 1947). 
 
 7. William March, The Bad Seed (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1954). 
 
 8. Curtis Bok, Star Wormwood (New York: Knopf, 1959). 
 
 9. Ibid., 205. 
 
 10. Ibid., 161. 
 
 11. The New York Journal American used this characterization frequently, par¬ 
 ticularly in the lead-up to the execution. 
 
 12. Martha Beck, quoted in Wenzell Brown, Introduction to Murder: The Un¬ 
 published Facts Behind the Notorious Lonely Hearts Killers Martha Beck and Ray Fer¬ 
 nandez (New York: Greenberg, 1952), 149 .1 have been unable to verify this quote. 
 Its tone, however, does match that of some of Martha Beck’s reproving letters to 
 the press published in part just after her death. It seems likely that she did say it, 
 and she certainly had cause, as we shall see in Chapters 4 and 5. 
 
 13. There is, of course, the problem of that important subgenre in true crime: 
 the unsolved murder. Where the tale lacks a murderer, the corpse must stand in. 
 The victim and the scene of the murder become ciphers for the absent author. 
 “How?” is asked as if it were “Why?” 
 
i4- Directed by Leonard Castle and Oliver Wood and starring Tony Lo Bianco 
 and Shirley Stoller. 
 
 15. James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York: Henry Holt, 
 1985); Kate Millett, The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice (New York: 
 Simon and Schuster, Touchstone, 1991 [orig. 1979]). 
 
 16. Baldwin is less gender-blind than Millett is inattentive to race. Baldwin’s 
 analysis of gender, however, is very much leveled at the category of the masculine. 
 
 1. Here There Be Killers 
 
 1. “Body Found,” Daily Sentinel , 26 August 1866. 
 
 2. Michel Foucault et al., eds., I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, 
 My Sister and My Brother ... (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 206. 
 
 3. Jane Caputi has scrupulously (if rather didactically) traced the power of the 
 narrative frame of “true crime” to mythologize both the act of murder and the 
 murderer — obscuring the discrete characteristics of act and actor and effectively 
 obliterating the victim. See her discussion on the creation of the Ripper mythol¬ 
 ogy and the wholesale repetition of the characteristics of that myth in crime 
 reporting (particularly of rape-murder) up to the present day. Jane Caputi, The 
 Age of Sex Crime (London: Women’s Press, 1987). 
 
 4. Josephine McDonagh, “Do or Die: Problems of Agency and Gender in the 
 Aesthetics of Murder,” Genders, no. 5 (Summer 1989): 123. 
 
 5. See Chapter Seven below for an analysis of the impact of the formalist mode 
 of legal reasoning in contemporary American jurisprudence. 
 
 6. Foucault speaks of a need to get away from the idea of power as law, so that an 
 analytics of power can map the operations of specific relations of power that occur 
 at the local level, the level of bodies, of moments, of the banal, the everyday, the 
 interior — those places, in short, which traditional analyses of power do not attend 
 to; that which one might call the “profane.” Traditional power’s relation to the 
 profane was only that of a realm to be contained and controlled; for Foucault the 
 profane is the ground, the circuit, of power. 
 
 The disciplines have grown out of an understanding of power as a thing to be 
 had, wielded, ameliorated, rationalized. Foucault’s critique of the development of 
 the human sciences cannot be abstracted from his work on the disciplining of 
 bodies and populations, “anatomo-” and “bio-politics,” and the “knowledge- 
 power” relation within which the body and species are the object of scrutiny but 
 are also subjects in process. Foucault’s complex analyses of the development of 
 the human sciences, “expert” knowledges, the carceral complex, and the produc¬ 
 tion of pathology are to be found in the works he produced from the mid-1970s 
 
 222 Notes to Introduction 
 
till his death. See particularly (but obviously not exclusively) Michel Foucault, The 
 Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976); Discipline and Pun¬ 
 ish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Peregrine, 1979); The Order of Things: An 
 Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971); and The History of 
 Sexuality, vol. 1 :An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1990). 
 
 7. For a structural and materialist account of the postwar success of the crime 
 story, see Ernest Mandel, Delightfiil Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story 
 (London: Pluto, 1984). 
 
 8. For an indication of the interplay between the chronicle of crime, crime 
 literature, and the growth of the newspaper media, see Beth Kalikoff, Murder and 
 Moral Decay in Victorian Literature (Arm Arbor: umi, 1990). See also David Ray 
 Papke, Framing the Criminal: Crime, Cultural Work and the Loss of Critical Perspec¬ 
 tive 1830-1900 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1987). 
 
 9. Michel Foucault, The Histoty of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: 
 Penguin, 1990), 138. 
 
 10. For a discussion of the Western relationship of modernity, individualism, 
 and death, see Philip A. Mellor and Chris Shilling, “Modernity, Self-Identity and 
 the Sequestration of Death,” Sociology 27, no. 3 (1993). 
 
 11. Davis, Homicide in American Fiction; Black, Aesthetics of Murder. 
 
 n. “fO]nce an event is covered, or ‘mediated,’ by the press or by television, it 
 essentially enters into the same quasi-fictional, hyperreal domain of all artistic 
 representation and misrepresentation” (Black, Aesthetics of Murder, 10). Although 
 his approach is supposedly extramoral, Black retains an uncharacteristic moralism 
 about textuality in his distinction between representation and misrepresentation. 
 
 13. Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, viii. 
 
 14. “During the course of our inquiry, we shall examine diverse theories and 
 distant relationships, but the unifying core will be the knowledge that man pos¬ 
 sesses, by virtue of his intelligence, an extraordinary capacity to kill” (ibid., ix). 
 
 15. James Gordon Bennett, quoted ibid., 162. 
 
 16. Drawing heavily on Bennett’s reporting, Howard wrote a full-length ac¬ 
 count of the case: The Lives of Helen Jewett and Richard P. Robinson, by the Editor of 
 the New York “National Police Gazette ” (New York: George Wilkes, Printer, 1848). 
 
 17. Joseph Holt Ingraham, Frank Rivers; or, The Dangers of the Town (1843). 
 
 18. “Helen Jewett’s sexuality is attractive but taboo, therefore she must die; but 
 in death she is even more appealing and even more forbidden” (Davis, Homicide in 
 American Fiction, 164). 
 
 19. Sander Gilman’s discussion of the beautiful female corpse in reference to 
 forensic pathology is instructive here. See Gilman, “ ‘I’m Down on Whores’: 
 Race and Gender in Victorian London,” in David Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of 
 Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 
 
 Notes to Chapter One 223 
 
20. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic 
 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 205. 
 
 21. Introduction to Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen, eds., 
 Death and Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 14. 
 
 22. Ibid., 13. 
 
 23. Davis argues that it was a metaphorical relationship between the deranged 
 values of the individual and the deranged values of society that fascinated Ameri¬ 
 can writers prior to the Civil War. In his reading of selected texts, Davis shows 
 that the individual criminal act of violence could simultaneously be an expression 
 of familial contest, patriarchal dominance, or even political rebellion. See Davis 
 on the spectre of European anarchism and fears of unrestrained democracy 
 (Homicide in American Fiction, 240-243). In terms of his complicated critique of 
 changing understandings of criminal responsibility, Davis contends that the de¬ 
 rangement of the murderous protagonist was the result of a flaw in reason, will, or 
 morality that weakened him, enabling the full force of an outside ill to drive him 
 to action. The model of the “ruling passion” governed much fiction of the period, 
 just as the theory of monomania was gaining ground in American psychiatry. 
 Davis’s discussion of the progression of American psychiatric thought and its 
 intersection with forensic psychiatry is supported by less “literary” analyses. See 
 Janet Colaizzi, Homicidal Insanity, 1800-1985 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama 
 Press, 1989) for a view from the profession itself. 
 
 24. It is interesting to note that there have recently been popular feminist 
 attempts to “rewrite” the nineteenth-century tale of seduction. See, for instance, 
 Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, The Madness of a Seduced Woman (London: Pan, 1989). 
 
 25. Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, 171. 
 
 26. Ibid., 201. 
 
 27. Davis’s characterization of “the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady” finds its 
 refined equivalent in Fiedler’s “Fair Maiden and Dark Lady.” 
 
 28. Michel Foucault et al., eds., I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, 
 My Sister, and My Brother ... A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (Lincoln: 
 University of Nebraska Press, 1975), xiii, 199. 
 
 29. “The event was freedom; it cut like a blade, perturbed, thwarted, or took 
 every sort of institution in the rear. An exemplary event, murder, here aimed, in a 
 frozen world, at the timelessness of oppression and the order of power” (Jean 
 Peter and Jeanne Favret, ibid., 186). 
 
 30. Auden, quoted in Black, Aesthetics of Murder, 7. 
 
 31. See McDonagh, “Do or Die,” 122. 
 
 32. Black , Aesthetics of Murder, 12,13, 16. 
 
 33. Quoted in Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotexte, 1983), 1. 
 
 34.1 have placed ironic emphasis on the term “serial killer” to demonstrate that 
 
 224 Notes to Chapter One 
 
it is not the found category of a new killer that criminologists would have it to be, 
 but is itself a historically and culturally particular construction. 
 
 35. David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” is a case in point. The publication of his 
 first letter to the police upped sales of the Daily News to over a million. The New 
 Yorker accused the practitioners of such journalistic sensationalism of engaging in 
 “self-fulfilling publicity”: encouraging the killer by “transforming him into a 
 celebrity.” See Caputi, Age of Sex Crime, 39-41. Another writer notes the effect, 
 after Berkowitz’s capture, of the killer’s rise in status: “Berkowitz, the mail clerk, 
 suddenly finds that every word becomes important; Berkowitz, the murderer, 
 discovers that a poem found in his pocket after capture becomes important.” See 
 Wayne Wilson, Good Murders and Bad Murders: A Consumer's Guide in the Age of 
 Information (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991), 203. 
 
 36. Black, Aesthetics of Murder, 17. 
 
 37. Ibid., 21. 
 
 38. Susan Griffin provides one of the more metaphysical analyses of the rela¬ 
 tion of the pornographer to the violent world he inhabits: “[W]hen a madman is 
 told that he does not see the world correctly, and when he is given evidence 
 against his prejudices, he will refuse to see the truth, and he will even distort this 
 evidence to support his own delusion. But, most significantly, he will even change 
 reality so it supports his mad idea of the world. . . . The deluded mind must try to 
 remake the world after an illusion [emphasis in original].” Susan Griffin, “Pornogra¬ 
 phy and Silence,” in Made from This Earth (London: Women’s Press, 1982), 136. 
 Griffin here retains a clear distinction between the mad (the unreal) and the true 
 (the real). The critical idea of what constitutes “mad” goes unexamined, and with 
 it an unproblematic “reality.” 
 
 39. There has been a plethora of findings —supporting variously a causal link, 
 no causal link, and the impossibility of establishing such a link! Thus the 1970 
 National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which found no causal 
 link, had its decision reversed by a 1986 Attorney General’s Commission which 
 found the exact opposite. 
 
 40. See Caputi, Age of Sex Crime, 36, 167. 
 
 41. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences ofMetn- 
 ory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 239. 
 
 42. Chapman was obsessed byj. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and styled him¬ 
 self as Holden Caulfield, a “latter-day” catcher. It is well known that Hinckley 
 modeled himself on Travis Bickle in the movie Taxi Driver— so dedicated to this 
 image, in fact, that he intended to “liberate” Jodie Foster from Yale, where she was 
 then studying (Foster had played the teen prostitute Bickle “saves” in the film). 
 
 43. Black, Aesthetics of Murder, 2 5. 
 
 44. Ibid. 
 
 Notes to Chapter One 225 
 
45- The term “urban legend” can be a little misleading if it is taken to restrict 
 the circulation of these modern apocrypha to metropolitan areas. 
 
 46. Ellis, “Death by Folklore,” 202. 
 
 47. Ibid., 208. 
 
 48. Ellis details the possible occurrence of murder by ostension in the killing 
 near Logan, Ohio, of Annette Cooper and Todd Schultz, whose corpses were 
 found dismembered and inscribed with signs. Although Cooper’s stepfather was 
 convicted of the murder (the verdict was overturned on appeal), both popular 
 belief and forensic evidence point to the murders as being an incidence of cult 
 sacrifice. Ibid., 209-218. 
 
 49. Ibid., 219. 
 
 50. “[N]ot only can facts be turned into narratives but narratives can also be 
 turned into facts” (Linda Degh and Andrew Vaszonyi, quoted ibid., 202). 
 
 2 . Parens Patriae 
 
 1. One critic has identified the appeal of the “idea of degeneration” for Ameri¬ 
 can writers in the period up to World War II: “For American writers, heart- 
 breakingly earnest about warning their countrymen that America not only was 
 failing to live up to its ideals but was becoming a plutocracy in which money was 
 the one true God, the idea of degeneration as a means to dramatize their concern 
 was so attractive for so long because of its dynamism. Unlike such static abstrac¬ 
 tions as the Fall and innate depravity, degeneration was a secular, historical pro¬ 
 cess. . . . [I]t allowed for the possibility that the degenerative process could be 
 reversed in time.” George Spangler, “The Idea of Degeneration in American 
 Fiction 1880-1940,” English Studies, no. 5 (1989): 435. 
 
 2. Motley, Knock on Any Door. 
 
 3. March, The Bad Seed. 
 
 4. The present book is in many ways indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, 
 although I have tried to maintain the theoretical precepts of the work as implicit 
 in order to avoid the scholarly genealogies that often form such an unwieldy part 
 of scholarly texts (and that seem to be, more often than not, relics of the disserta¬ 
 tion stage). Undeniably, however, my critiques have been shaped by Foucault and, 
 particularly, by his introductory volume in The History of Sexuality. 
 
 5. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, 130. 
 
 6. Ibid., 147. 
 
 7. These unities are, briefly, 
 
 1. A hystericization of \women's bodies: . . . whereby it [the feminine body] was 
 
 integrated into the sphere of medical practices, by reason of a pathology intrin- 
 
 226 Notes to Chapter One 
 
sic to it; whereby finally, it was placed in organic communication with the social 
 body (whose regulated fecundity it was supposed to ensure), the family space ... 
 and the life of children.... 
 
 2. A pedagogicization of children's sex. . . . [A] 11 children indulge or are prone to 
 indulge in sexual activity, and that, being unwarranted, at the same time “natu¬ 
 ral” and “contrary to nature,” this sexual activity posed physical and moral, 
 individual and collective dangers.... 
 
 3 .A socialization ofprocreative behaviour.... 
 
 4 .A psychiatrization of perverse pleasures. 
 
 This whole section (ibid., 104-105) is crucial to my project here. 
 
 8. Ibid., 104. 
 
 9. While this is obvious in many ways, both in the tone and the thematic 
 preoccupations of the work, it is best evidenced by the use of popular songs 
 throughout the text, all of which hit the charts prior to 1940. Motley wrote the 
 bulk of the work from 1940 to 1943 (but revised it extensively thereafter). Its 
 genesis, however, dates from the much earlier short fictional works eventually 
 integrated into the novel. See Robert Fleming, Willard Motley (Boston: Twayne, 
 1978). 
 
 10. In critical and popular terms, this was the best received of all Motley’s 
 novels. After two years of sale, 350,000 copies were in print, 47,000 of which had 
 sold in the first two weeks. One (white) reviewer thought that it invited com¬ 
 parison with Richard Wright’s Native Son, and that it was the better work. See 
 ibid., 59-63, for an overview of the critical response. 
 
 11. See The Diaries of Willard Motley, ed. Jerome Klinkowitz (Ames: Iowa State 
 University, 1979), particularly the introduction and the years 1938-1941. 
 
 12. The plot ot Knock on Any Door mirrors elements of both those other seminal 
 works. But this mirror gives back different reflections. Modey tackles the sexual 
 double standard, as does Dreiser in the sequence involving Clyde’s sister’s seques¬ 
 tration during her pregnancy (she was unmarried). Clyde is quite helpless before 
 his sister’s shame. But when Nick’s sister comes to him for help about getting an 
 abortion, Nick is disposed and able to help her get it. Ang retains her respectabil¬ 
 ity; Nick never attains his. This reflection of the earlier naturalistic work shows 
 critical engagement, not plagiarism. An analysis of apparent parallels between 
 Knock on Any Door and Native Son would likely show a similar critical engagement. 
 
 13. Motley, Knock on Any Door, 478. 
 
 14. See Chapter Seven below for an analysis of Baldwin’s coding of degraded 
 manhood in relation to the concept of “sorriness” in the African American 
 community. 
 
 15. See Ian Hacking ( Rewriting the Soul, 210-220) on the historical develop¬ 
 ment of the concept of “trauma.” Although Hacking is concerned with the de- 
 
 Notes to Chapter Two 227 
 
velopment of the categories of “child abuse” and “multiple personality disorder,” 
 and their relationship to the investment of Western modernity in the idea of 
 memory, his work is an illuminating exercise of some of Foucault’s critical work 
 around the “pedagogicization of children’s sex.” 
 
 16. Note that Foucault does not differentiate in his discussion of the “ped¬ 
 agogicization of children’s sex” between the “child” and the “adolescent,” yet the 
 discursive differentiation is important here because of the salience that juvenile 
 (meaning adolescent) sexuality was assuming in discussions about juvenile delin¬ 
 quency' in the United States when Motley wrote his novel. 
 
 17. Modey, Knock on Any Door, 123. 
 
 18. Ibid., 119, 123,128, 155. 
 
 19. Ibid., 128. 
 
 20. Ibid., 129. 
 
 21. Ibid., 147. 
 
 22. Ibid., 151. 
 
 23. Ibid., 181-182, 184. 
 
 24. Ibid., 292. 
 
 25. Ibid., 296-297. 
 
 26. Indeed, the novel — though not well remembered now — can boast to be the 
 originating text for this phrase. 
 
 27. Ibid., 481-482. 
 
 28. The film foregrounds the murder in a way that suggests the diminution of 
 the materialism of the novel in favor of “suspense.” Its reworking produced a hy¬ 
 brid of detective and courtroom drama (the primary search being for motivation). 
 
 29. Modey’s novel seeks to dispel the “legitimacy” of certain forms of state- 
 sanctioned violence, most particularly that of the police, the judiciary, and 
 corrections. 
 
 30. Parens patriae is a paradoxical phrase connoting the generative fatherland as 
 well as the feminine (conveyed by the Latin gender of both words of the phrase). 
 It is an apt phrase for Modey’s critique of authority and the masculine. 
 
 31. If Nick had been able to make love to Emma, she would not have killed 
 herself; had she not died, he would not have killed Riley; had he not killed Riley, 
 his mother would be happy. 
 
 32. Stanley Hyman (untided review), New Republic, 8 February 1943, p. 188. 
 
 33. March told his friend, Clint Bolton, that the novel was to be a portrait of 
 “planned evilness.” See Bolton, quoted in Roy Simmonds, “Cathy Ames and 
 Rhoda Penmark: Two Child Monsters,” The Mississippi Quarterly 39 (Spring 
 1986): 99. 
 
 34. Bolton, quoted ibid., 98. 
 
 35. It is worth remembering at this point that Willard Modey extensively 
 
 228 Notes to Chapter Two 
 
researched the various institutional settings for his novel, from the reformatory 
 through to the trial process. He is said to have used real characters he encountered 
 in that research. See Fleming, Willard Motley, 36-40. 
 
 36. “Already she [Christine] missed her husband, and although she had become 
 reconciled to these necessary absences, she had never become used to them; and 
 standing quietly in her living room she thought that all her life she had waited for 
 someone —first her father, and now her husband” (March, The Bad Seed, 44-45). 
 
 37. Ibid., 188. 
 
 38. Looking at a photograph of her husband, Christine sees the brown eyes that 
 “looked out at the world with a sort of innocent eagerness” (ibid., 126). A descrip¬ 
 tion remarkably similar to that of August Denker. 
 
 39. While Christine’s suspicions were aroused by the peculiar circumstances 
 surrounding the death —to which Rhoda was sole wimess —of an elderly neigh¬ 
 bor in Baltimore, her husband cannot even begin to entertain doubts. 
 
 40. Ibid., 99. 
 
 41. Christine writes in another letter that cannot be sent to Kenneth: “I feel 
 now more strongly than ever that the problem of Rhoda is not the joint one I con¬ 
 sidered it: the problem is mine, and I must solve it alone. I alone am responsible. It 
 was I who carried the bad seed that made her what she is, not you” (ibid., 206). 
 
 42. Ibid., 210-211. 
 
 43. Ibid., 33. 
 
 44. Rhoda is portrayed as an atavistic throwback, and the description of her 
 “peculiar character” in regard to her acquisitiveness is naturalizing even at the 
 point when it is considered merely a curiosity, not a threat: “She was like a 
 charming little animal that can never be trained to fit into the conventional 
 pattern of existence” (ibid., 46). 
 
 45. Ibid., 64. 
 
 46. This dangerous naivete is demonstrated by Monica Breedlove’s attitude 
 toward Leroy, and Monica’s brother and friends all counsel her to dismiss Leroy. 
 She ignores both Leroy’s surliness and their advice “not because she condoned his 
 actions, but because she considered him disturbed and hardly responsible for 
 some of his acts” (ibid., 26). March is making a frontal assault here on the ten¬ 
 dency of certain powerful schools of forensic psychiatry to abolish personal re¬ 
 sponsibility for criminal or “antisocial” acts. Monica Breedlove, a passionate de¬ 
 votee of Freudian psychoanalysis, is frequently used as a device to attack the 
 dangerous vanities of a science of mind. 
 
 47. Leroy nurtures his grievances against the society that has deprived him, 
 grievances apparently backed up by a sociological model that holds an oppressive 
 society to account for the individual’s actual and potential wrongs: “his mind 
 rehearsed eternally the inequities forced upon him — inequities which he must 
 
 Notes to Chapter Two 229 
 
endure in silence, since he was one of the underprivileged ones of the world: the 
 unfortunate son of an unfortunate sharecropper, the pathetic victim of an oppres¬ 
 sive system, as everyone who knew anything at all admitted, and had admitted for a long 
 time [emphasis mine]” (ibid., 20). Leroy is enamored of the hierarchy of privilege 
 that excuses him anything —so much so that he has invented wholesale his own 
 lowly position in that hierarchy (ibid., 64). 
 
 48. Ibid., 39. 
 
 49. “A few of the gravestones, with their authentic dates, and affirmations of a 
 quainter morality than our own, had been left as they were, as though they, too, 
 were shrubs of a sort; as though they could put the earnest reader into that mood 
 of sadness, that sense of the transience of life, which is the reason of the philoso¬ 
 pher’s reading” (ibid., 215). 
 
 50. In the film version of The Bad Seed Reginald Tasker is called not “that true 
 crime writer” but that “criminologist” — a handy confusion which inadvertently 
 reduces criminology from a scholarly discipline to a journalistic fairy tale for 
 bombasts (which it arguably is). This slippage makes quite clear the interdepen¬ 
 dence of scholarly and popular discourses of criminality. 
 
 51. Ibid., 50. 
 
 52. Ibid., 147. 
 
 53. Nurse Earle Dennison’s murder indictment was contemporary with 
 March’s writing: she was executed in Alabama in September 1953. Also men¬ 
 tioned are Beulah Hunnicutt, Norma Jean Brooks, Richard Walsh, Milton Drury, 
 Houston Roberts, and the poisoners Tillie Klimek and Daisy de Melker (ibid., 
 1 53— 1 54). Amy Archer-Gilligan, Belle Gunness, Bertha Hill, Catherine Wilson, 
 Anna Hahn, Jane Toppan, and Susi Olah are all listed as precursors to the fic¬ 
 titious Bessie Denker (pp. 164-165). Eva Coo, Madeleine Smith, Lizzie Borden, 
 and Lydia Southard also get “favorable” mentions in comparison to Bessie Den¬ 
 ker (pp. 179-180). Of all the real murderers drawn on, the most crucial are Belle 
 Gunness and Ruth Brown Snyder —from whom the composite figure which is 
 Bessie Denker is made. 
 
 54. A definition very unlike the more recent “motiveless” crime that is a catch¬ 
 all descriptor for the apparent rise in the “thrill-killing” of strangers. 
 
 55. Ibid., 51-57. 
 
 56. Wertham did write on murder as a popular forensic psychologist, but he 
 would probably have been horrified to have himself tagged as being in the true 
 crime genre. I would argue, however, that Wertham wrote in what I term the 
 “high literature” of true crime. See Chapter Three below. 
 
 57. Ibid., 55. 
 
 58. See Hayden White on the ironic mode of narrative in his Tropics of Discourse: 
 Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 
 
 230 Notes to Chapter Two 
 
59- March, The Bad Seed, 129, 169, 180. 
 
 60. There are other examples of this. Tasker’s case notes on Bessie Denker are 
 full of speculation from “Bessie Denker’s admirers” concerning her involvement 
 in the mysterious deaths among her family when she was a child (ibid., 187). 
 
 61. “[F]or years he’d read, collected, annotated, and digested cases of the 
 type ... and it seemed to him that environment had little to do with its persistent 
 appearance, although, conceivably, environment might modify its outward as¬ 
 pects. The simplest way to understand the type was to regard them as the normal 
 human beings of fifty thousand years ago, before man began his task of civilizing 
 himself, or built his code of axioms into the moral codes that govern us” (ibid., 
 
 I 7 8 -i79)- 
 
 62. Ibid., 244-245. 
 
 63. Ibid., 215, 244. 
 
 64. Belle Gunness (i860-?) was never apprehended after her flight from the La 
 Porte, Indiana farm where authorities located the grisly remains, buried around 
 the property, of her various wealthy suitors (mail-order husbands who traveled 
 there in response to her offer of property and romance). Her story features at 
 length in various murder dictionaries. See J. R. Nash, Murder America: Homicide in 
 the United States from 1850 to the Present (London: Harrap, 1961); Ann Jones, 
 Women Who Kill (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1980), 129-39; an d 
 Kerry Segrave, Women Serial and Mass Murderers: A Worldwide Reference, 1980- 
 1990 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1992) for several different extensive treat¬ 
 ments. Belle may also have been a particularly tempting choice for March because 
 of the media circus that surrounded the exhumation of the bodies of Belle’s suc¬ 
 cessive suitors. Trainloads of sightseers arrived to watch the proceedings, prac¬ 
 tically dismantling the farm for souvenirs. 
 
 65. March, The Bad Seed, 243. 
 
 66. The phrase is Adrienne Rich’s, from her poem “For Ethel Rosenberg.” 
 
 67. The best discussion of Snyder’s case is in Jones, Women Who Kill. 
 
 68. March, The Bad Seed, 150. 
 
 69. See Clint Bolton, quoted in Simmonds, “Cathy Ames and Rhoda Pen- 
 mark,” 98. 
 
 70. March, The Bad Seed, 137. 
 
 71. Ibid., 138. 
 
 72. Ibid. 
 
 73. Ibid., 208. Earlier in the novel Christine observes Rhoda’s enthusiasm for 
 her Sunday school lessons, no doubt an enthusiasm encouraged by the presenta¬ 
 tion of prizes for lessons well learned. But the passage for that day’s text fore¬ 
 shadows Christine’s recognition of Rhoda’s affinity for the “bloodier precepts of 
 the Old Testament: ... it centred around the damnation and most cruel destruc- 
 
 Notes to Chapter Two 231 
 
tion of those who had been unable, or unwilling, to conform blindly to some 
 Hebraic party line of that day. . .. Christine read the text slowly, shook her head 
 and thought, ‘Is there nothing but violence everywhere?’ ” (pp. 70-71). 
 
 74. Ibid., 39. 
 
 75. In the novel, Christine’s research is mainly done by reading , a highly un- 
 dramatic activity- 
 
 76. Again, the progress of Christine’s awful discoveries and the increasing 
 complexity of her dilemma are described in the novel by means of her internal 
 monologues — difficult to transcribe onto the screen (although the voice-over had 
 been a staple of the film noir detective genre). 
 
 77. Cold War discourse on the family has received a good deal of attention in 
 recent scholarship on gender and the family in Cold War culture. See, for in¬ 
 stance, Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era 
 (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Arlene Skolnick, Embattled Paradise: The Ameri¬ 
 can Family in the Age of Uncertainty (New York: Basic Books, 1991). I am indebted 
 also to Dr. Geoffrey Smith, of Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, for access 
 to his forthcoming study of gender and sexuality in the Cold War era. 
 
 78. Rather than a quantitative view like March’s. For a thoroughgoing inter¬ 
 disciplinary 7 discussion of the history of quantitative and qualitative theories of 
 pathology, see Georges Canguilheim, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: 
 Zone, 1991). 
 
 79. In a letter to a friend, Motley described mgm’s reaction to the screenplay of 
 his novel (which they’d just promised to purchase when Knock on Any Door was 
 chosen as “Best Novel of the Year” in their studio contest). The deal fell through 
 when the Breen office reported that the novel “encouraged juvenile delinquency, 
 was immoral, indecent, etc.” (Klinkowitz, ed., The Diaries of Willard Motley, xix). 
 
 3. Min(d)ing the Murderer 
 
 1. Wertham, Show of Violence; Bok, Star Wotynwood. 
 
 2. For mo quite different interpretive directions taken from the mythical ar¬ 
 chetypes of murder, see Rene Girard, “The Sacrificial Crisis,” in Critical Theory 
 since 1965 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986) and Nicole Ward 
 Jouve, “The Streetcleaner”: The Yorkshire Ripper Case on Trial (London: Marion 
 Boyars, 1986). 
 
 3. “It is the historical function of psychiatry in relation to law at the present 
 time to introduce into criminal cases facts and interpretations of facts which 
 psychiatry and psychoanalysis have taught us. This will not only help in the 
 proper disposition of cases but will aid in the prevention of crime and will lead 
 
 232 Notes to Chapter Two 
 
more and more to the principle of safeguarding the community” (Wertham, Show 
 of Violence, 24-25). 
 
 4. In this I follow Michel Foucault’s construction of the development of the 
 discourse of the “human sciences,” explicated in The Order of Things and The 
 Archeology of Knowledge. 
 
 5. Wertham, Show of Violence, 128. 
 
 6. See Fredric Jameson’s discussion of generic systems, implementing Edmund 
 Flusserl’s theory of “sedimentation,” in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a 
 Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), 139-141^2. 
 
 7. Wertham considered himself lucky to have had an opportunity to study at 
 length this young man, who became his patient years before he would commit the 
 triple murder for which he became infamous. Irwin features largely in The Show of 
 Violence. 
 
 8. Wertham, Show of Violence, hi. 
 
 9. See, for instance, the way in which Wertham’s suggestion to Irwin that he 
 had a “love-hate relationship” with his mother structured the highlighting of 
 certain “revelatory” recollections by Irwin ofhis mother. Ibid., 125-126. 
 
 10. See Russell Grigg, “Subject, Object, and the Transference,” in E. Ragland- 
 Sullivan and M. Bracher, eds., Lacan and the Subject of Language (New York: 
 Routledge, 1991), 108-109. 
 
 11. Michel Foucault, “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous’ Individual in 19th 
 Century Legal Psychiatry,” in D. Weisstub, ed., Law and Psychiatry (New York: 
 Pergamon, 1978). 
 
 12. This compromise is explored at length by Thomas Berger’s novel, Killing 
 Time (New York: Delta, 1967), structured loosely around the story of Irwin as 
 mediated by Wertham, Quentin Reynolds, and the media at large. For an analysis 
 of Killing Time as a critique of the discourses that circumscribed Irwin, see Jon 
 Wallace, “A Murderous Clarity: A Reading of Thomas Berger’s Killing Time, ” 
 Philological Quarterly 68, no. 1 (1989). Although I would like to deal with Berger’s 
 novel, space does not allow me to do so here. 
 
 13. These included charitable institutions and psychiatric clinics. The timing of 
 Irwin’s incarceration — during the lean years of the Great Depression, when Irwin 
 could find no work and little afford lodgings — begs the question of the reason for 
 Irwin’s “flight into custody.” 
 
 14. Wertham, Show of Violence, 101-102. For a complete rendering of Irwin’s 
 first interview with the police and his statement, see Quentin Reynolds, Court¬ 
 room: The Story of Samuel S. Leihowitz (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), 123-128. 
 
 15. Wertham provided a definition of “catathymic crisis” in an earlier case 
 study in The Show of Violence. Explaining the murder of her children by a woman 
 he calls “Madeline,” Wertham writes: “Madeline suffered from a reactive depres- 
 
 Notes to Chapter Three 233 
 
sion with delusions. The aberration of reasoning under the impact of emotional 
 complexes (technically called catathymic) accounted for the crisis —that is, the 
 outbreak of violence. Psychiatrically we speak of such a condition as catathymic 
 crisis” ( Show of Violence, 76). 
 
 16. Quoted ibid., 139. 
 
 17. Reynolds, Courtroom , 114. Emphasis mine. 
 
 18. For an interesting explication (in an entirely different context) of the prob¬ 
 lem of “retroactive anticipation,” see Jane Gallop, “Where to Begin?” in Reading 
 Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 
 
 19. Reynolds, Courtroom, 114. 
 
 20. Wertham, Show of Violence, 170. 
 
 21. Ibid., 140. 
 
 22. Wertham, Show of Violence, 170. 
 
 2 3. For Lacan and Freud, a pact based upon the “free consent and liberty of the 
 patient.” See Grigg, “Subject, Object, and the Transference,” 104-109. 
 
 24. W ertham, Show of Violence, 125. 
 
 25. The “glory” of Irwin’s “attainment” was to be arrived at by the development 
 of the psychic skill he called “visualization.” Visualization was a means to redeem 
 the insufficiencies of memory, to recall from the past, in their nuanced entirety, 
 works of art and literature, historical figures and, eventually, the past itself “as 
 living.” It was Irwin’s professed belief that he could develop such a skill that led 
 him to tell the police in his initial statement that the lives of his victims were not 
 “lost”: “theirs are borrowed lives, and if I live I will repay them.” Statement by 
 Robert Irwin, 27 June 1937, quoted in Reynolds, Courtroom, \i-j. 
 
 26. Wertham, Show of Violence, 178. 
 
 27. According to Wertham, Irwin had a “consuming drive to excel for the favor 
 of his mother” and “he was very close to her, but she unwittingly stimulated his 
 ambivalent feelings about her” (by calling him, for instance, “a regular girl”). 
 Ibid., 172. The doctor went on to explain Irwin’s “abnormal attachment to his 
 mother,” as follows: “The mother-image, distorted in his mind and loved and 
 hated at the same time, prevented him from making a normal love adjustment to 
 other women without leading to a dominant homosexual pattern. He acted as if he 
 wished to keep indefinitely an overwhelmingly pure love for his mother. ... [H]e 
 repeatedly showed friendliness for older women who were like mothers to him. 
 He would leave these mother substitutes as abruptly as he had left his mother” 
 
 (P- 177 )- 
 
 28. Riviere’s bid for fame is complicated by the production of the memoir. The 
 act of writing and the murder constitute, in effect, a single act: “the fact of killing 
 and the fact of writing, the deeds done and the things narrated, coincided since 
 
 2 34 Notes to Chapter Three 
 
they were elements of a like nature.” Michel Foucault, “Tales of Murder,” in 
 Foucault et ah, eds., I, Pierre Riviere, 200. 
 
 29. Quoted in Foucault et ah, eds., I, Pierre Riviere, 108, 105. 
 
 30. Wertham, Show of Violence, 170 (emphasis mine), 122, 123. 
 
 31. Ibid., 123. 
 
 32.Ibid. 
 
 33. Ibid., 178. 
 
 34. Ibid., 177. 
 
 35. Statement by Robert Irwin, quoted in Reynolds, Courtroom, 126. 
 
 36. Wertham, Show of Violence, 136. 
 
 37. Ibid., 105. 
 
 38. See L. Stephens, “Still Ripping One Hundred Years On: Regarding the 
 ‘Ripper Centenary,’ ” Antithesis, 3, no. 2 (1990), for a discussion of this process of 
 the murderer’s sexualization of the female victim/corpse and the following discur¬ 
 sive desexualization of the crime by its commentators through the reduction of 
 what constitutes the sexual. The discourse that denies the sexual metaphor in the 
 Ripper’s murders does so only by its repression of such knowledge of the sexual. 
 
 39. Statement by Robert Irwin, quoted in Reynolds, Courtroom, 126. 
 
 40. Ibid., 126-127. 
 
 41. Ibid., 127. 
 
 42. See Jacqueline Rose’s introduction to the set of readings by Lacan on the 
 problem of feminine sexuality and the creation of the female subject —the double 
 bind of feminine subjectivity —in Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell, eds., Femi¬ 
 nine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne (New York: Norton, 1985), 
 2 7 ~ 59 - 
 
 43. On the tropic relation of Woman and Death in Western culture generally, 
 see Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body. 
 
 44. She becomes both Irwin’s literal mother and representative of the arche¬ 
 typal devouring Mother. 
 
 45. Some years earlier and before the self-emasculation attempt that would 
 land him in the hospital and first bring him into contact with the doctor, Irwin 
 wrote to a girlfriend that he wanted to “cut off his penis in order to ‘bottle up his 
 sexual energy’ for higher purposes” (Wertham, Show of Violence, 122). 
 
 46. Irwin, quoted in Reynolds, Courtroom, 137. 
 
 47. As distinct from the phallus. It might seem that the omission of this critically 
 important signifying term is even more surprising — an omission that indicates 
 both Wertham’s relative lack of fidelity to the rigors of Freudian analysis and the 
 distance of the Anglo-American school from its Lacanian-influenced Continental 
 counterpart. 
 
 Notes to Chapter Three 235 
 
48. Wertham, Show of Violence, 154. 
 
 49. Inevitably, this relocation of the borders of the self results in a radical 
 redefinition of the divine. Irwin’s investment of himself into others naturally does 
 away with the differentiation that leaves the divine “out there,” elsewhere. This 
 philosophical tendency of Irwin’s bamboozled his later analysts, leading them to 
 suggest that he thought himself to be God. As the following exchange between 
 Dr. Hinsie and Irwin makes clear, this was not quite the case: 
 
 Q:... You and divinity and God and the universal mind are all one[?] 
 
 A: So are you, of course. 
 
 Q: Then I can only conclude or reframe your statement to read as coming from 
 
 you, “I am God.” 
 
 A: Yes. Absolutely! Since you limit your whole statement to me, exactly. 
 
 [...] 
 
 Q: Do you wish to cancel anything that you said here? 
 
 A: No, I do not. If you leave it to me, I prefer to say that I am divinity, but you 
 
 are too. 
 
 Quoted in Reynolds, Courtroom, 136. 
 
 50. A model that figures the flawed link between Irwin and his mother: his need 
 to find, then annihilate, her surrogate. 
 
 51. Such an explanation is not uncommon among people charged with homi¬ 
 cide. The protestation that everything “passed in a blur” could indicate either a 
 strategic response (in preparation for the defense of insanity or diminished re¬ 
 sponsibility) or a genuine description of shock. 
 
 52. Wertham, Show of Violence, 153. 
 
 53. Ibid., 170. 
 
 54. Just before sentencing, when asked by the court whether there was anything 
 he wished to say, Irwin pointedly told the press gallery: “I have nothing but 
 contempt for you. You have lied about me continually. You have told untruths. 
 You are dirty dogs.” Quoted in Reynolds, Courtroom, 148. 
 
 55. Wertham, Show of Violence, 161. 
 
 56. Irwin, however, did redirect this sum toward paying the legal costs of his 
 defense. Reynolds, Courtroom, 122. 
 
 57. The S500 Irwin charged his lawyer in exchange for his agreement to plead 
 guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder was to go toward the perfection 
 of his “visualization” skills. Significandy, it was the change in the direction of his story 
 augured by the plea bargain that annoyed Invin: “Leibowitz had quite a time 
 persuading Irwin to plead guilty of second-degree murder. Irwin felt cheated. He 
 wanted to appear on the stand and expound his theory of divinity to the public. 
 It took all of Leibowitz’ persuasive powers to convince him to plead guilty of 
 
 236 Notes to Chapter Three 
 
second-degree murder. Irwin made one condition. He would allow Leibowitz to 
 have his way if Leibowitz would give him five hundred dollars” (ibid., 146). 
 
 58. Irwin’s ambition to reconstruct lost places, people, time, was the source of 
 his insistence that he had only “borrowed” the lives of the Gedeons and Byrnes. 
 
 59. “In a human being’s life, murder is one of the most crucial, experiment-like 
 events that can possibly take place. It reveals the innermost springs of the individ¬ 
 ual’s life and is a profound self-revelation of character” (Wertham, Show of Vio¬ 
 lence, 245-246). 
 
 60. Ibid., 253. 
 
 61. Ibid., 164. 
 
 62. This distinction can also be identified in Wertham’s treatment of the ideo¬ 
 logical nature of the concept of murder. He asks, for instance, why it is that 
 industrial accidents — caused by the callousness and greed of employers (he de¬ 
 nounces the theory of worker carelessness) — do not earn the title of “murder.” In 
 his discussion of the concept of the criminal in Nazi Germany, he also raises inter¬ 
 esting questions about the normalization of murder by its elevation to a system 
 (ibid., 241-266). See, too, Wertham’s article “It’s Murder” in the Saturday Review 
 of Literature, 5 February 1949, pp. 7-9, 33-34 for a distillation of this analysis. 
 
 63. Unlike Irwin, “Mary” had not become nationally infamous, and she there¬ 
 fore did not warrant the use of her real name. One effect of the lack of the “real” 
 Mary is the tendency for her to become a sign of something else —whether the 
 incarnation of a mythic child murderer or a benchmark of the state of working- 
 class motherhood. 
 
 64. See Hilary Allen, “Rendering Them Harmless: The Professional Portrayal 
 of Women Charged with Serious Violent Crimes,” in P. Carlen and A. Worrall, 
 eds., Gender, Crime and Justice (London: Open University, 1987). 
 
 65. Wertham, Show of Violence, 235. It would seem that Irwin’s symbolic ma¬ 
 tricide, part of his multiple murder, in no way approaches the “extreme horror” of 
 the outcome of Mary’s frustrations. In such a reading, then, mothers make more 
 logical victims than they make agents of destruction. 
 
 66. Who was deported after the trial, although innocent of any criminal 
 wrong. 
 
 67. Ibid., 218. 
 
 68. Medea’s role as statusless foreigner is defined in direct reference to the civil 
 role of wife/mother which she is denied. 
 
 69. “Mary,” quoted ibid., 224. 
 
 70. See A. Shapiro, “Disordered Bodies? Disorderly Acts: Medical Disclosure 
 and the Female Criminal in Nineteenth Century Paris,” Genders, no. 4 (Spring 
 1989): 68-86. 
 
 Notes to Chapter Three 237 
 
71. Wertham, Show of Violence, 247. 
 
 72. As is very much the case with Kate Millett’s The Basement, examined in 
 Chapter Seven below. 
 
 73. Bok, Star Wormwood, 3. 
 
 74. “From somewhere deep within him an old memory flashed: ‘Part of me 
 would stick out!’ ” Ibid., 39. 
 
 75. Ibid., 49. 
 
 76. “The state” is a problematic concept, but a fundamental one in the liberal 
 lexicon and the term that best fits the tone of Bok’s critique. He does recognize 
 the power of certain jurisdictions to judge and punish with greater compassion 
 than others, but it is the system that tolerates such differences which is the focus of 
 his critique. As a Pennsylvania Supreme Court judge (the court of last resort in 
 Pennsylvania) Bok was perhaps thinking of the responsibility of federal law to 
 mitigate the unnecessary force of some local capital statutes. 
 
 77. Ibid., 4. 
 
 78. Forty-six states practiced one or more forms of capital punishment up to the 
 period of the moratorium in the early 1970s initiated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 
 ruling in Furman v. Georgia (overturned by the Gregg v. Georgia decision). Cur¬ 
 rently, thirty-eight states impose capital punishment, as well as the federal gov¬ 
 ernment, which has the statutory power to execute but has not done so since 1953. 
 See William Bowers, Legal Homicide: Death as Punishment in America, 1864-1982 
 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984) app. A. For a comprehensive anal¬ 
 ysis of the judicial history' of death statutes, see Jeffrey Pokorak, “ ‘Death Stands 
 Condemned’: Justice Brennan and the Death Penalty,” California Western Law 
 Review 27 (1990/91). 
 
 79. For an insightful discussion of the rationalizations advanced in capital 
 punishment’s support (by an author who does not, herself, support the death 
 penalty), see Susan Jacoby, Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (New York: 
 Harper and Row, 1983). 
 
 80. See Lawrence Klein, “The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: An 
 Assessment of the Estimates,” in Alfred Blumstein et al., eds., Deterrence and 
 Incapacitation: Estimating the Effect of Criminal Sanctions on Crime Rates (Wash¬ 
 ington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1978). 
 
 81. This revival is demonstrated by the swiftness with which successive state 
 legislatures reformulated their death penalty statutes when their constitutionality 
 was questioned by the Furman decision. These reformulations resulted in a 
 huge increase in administrative expenditures to ensure the proper functioning of 
 “super due process.” See Reviving the Death Penalty (Hudson, Wise.: G. E. Mc- 
 Guen, 1985); Alan Blakley, “The Cost of Killing Criminals,” Northern Kentucky 
 Law Review 18 (Fall 1990); F. Zimring and G. Hawkins, Capital Punishment and the 
 
 238 Notes to Chapter Three 
 
American Agenda (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and T. Sellin, 
 The Penalty of Death (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980). 
 
 82. For an analysis of this trend, see Michael Massing’s review article about 
 recent scholarship on drug cultures and crime in America. “Crime and Drugs: 
 The New Myths,” New York Review of Books, February 1996, pp. 16-20. 
 
 83. See Richard Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American 
 Histoty and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) for an analysis of 
 the dire ramifications of the American conception of “justifiable homicide” for 
 domestic and international relations, both past and present. 
 
 84. The case of Bernhard Goetz is exemplary here. When Goetz shot four 
 black youths (permanently crippling one) on a subway train in New York, his act 
 of preemptive “self-defense” raised great controversy. Writers have since noted 
 that Goetz’s explanation of his actions hardly supported even the legal definition 
 of self-defense noted above. Despite the dubious nature of his claim of self- 
 defense, the response of media and public was overwhelmingly supportive of 
 his actions (with the notable exception of the black community). See George 
 Fletcher, A Crime of Self-Defense: Bernhard Goetz and the Law on Trial (New York: 
 Collier Macmillan, 1988); Lillian Rubin, Quiet Rage: Bemie Goetz in a Time of 
 Madness (London: Faber, 1987). 
 
 85. See Chapter Eight below. 
 
 86. Using the example of Adolf Eichmann, executed by the Israeli government 
 by virtue of extraordinary legislation, Susan Jacoby argues that the idea of the 
 “most deserving case” for execution is both logically and ethically bankrupt. How 
 can killing one man possibly form a balanced and just punishment for his killing of 
 two, let alone a thousand, victims? The issue here is not numbers, but the qualita¬ 
 tive value and meaning of individual life for which neither an equivalent nor a 
 surrogate can be found. See Jacoby, Wild Justice. 
 
 87. The imbalance between murder and execution is tacitly acknowledged by 
 the much-debated changes in the criteria under which a crime can be designated 
 “capital.” A number of these criteria are both quantitative and qualitative in their 
 very subjective weighing of the severity of the crime. Thus many states rule that 
 capital homicide is one that (among other things) involves torture or multiple 
 victims. For an extensive analysis of the guidelines on “aggravating and mitigating 
 circumstances” in post -Furman capital legislation, see Pokorak, “Death Stands 
 Condemned,” 271-274. 
 
 88. The problem of what to do with the “serial killer” — the bogeyman of late 
 twentieth-century America — is a case in point. For the punishment to reflect the 
 crime and be just, more would be required than merely killing the killer. 
 
 89. Bok, Star Wormwood , 11. 
 
 90. “Her mind sheered off to an easier emotion, hatred of Joe and soon of all 
 
 Notes to Chapter Three 239 
 
mankind for its cruelty and its traps. . . . [S]he could not die without devising a 
 fitting act of revenge upon some of them” (ibid., 15). Although Bok uses the 
 generic term “mankind” here, the context makes clear Angela’s need to revenge 
 herself on the male of the species. 
 
 91. Ibid., 36. 
 
 92. While there are identifiable positions in the text for good and bad father, 
 the concept of bad mother appears but once and then rather elliptically. Roger is 
 raised by an aunt, his mother having run off in his infancy: “Roger ... could not 
 have borne his aunt if she had been a roaring, noisy woman intent on shattering 
 him with her glowing affection. Most boys are shamed, bored, and sustained by 
 violent maternal emotion, so that to the end of their lives they utter the sound 
 Mother in a tremulous voice as if it were a holy and self-executing word.” Note 
 here too the discrimination between sound —void of content —and meaning. 
 Ibid., 19. 
 
 93. Ibid., 45. 
 
 94. “Grown-ups rarely bothered about kids, but when they did they had the 
 strength to beat down any opposition. All they had to do was try, because other 
 grown-ups were always preoccupied and would pay only half-attention” (ibid., 
 46). And, as Roger hears the verdict of guilty, he reflects that “the grown-ups had 
 won after all” (pp. 12 3-124). 
 
 95. Ibid., 161. 
 
 96. Ibid., 6. 
 
 97. I use here the Derridean concept of “supplementarity” — a paradoxical 
 excess that is part of (supplementary to) the story, but also is needed to complete it. 
 For a demonstration of the quality of the concept, see Jonathan Culler’s discussion 
 of Woman treated as supplement by psychoanalytic discourse. Culler, On De¬ 
 construction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (New York: Cornell Univer¬ 
 sity Press, 1982), 102-106, 160-171, 195-199. 
 
 98. Bok, Star Wormwood, 69. 
 
 99. Ibid., 161. 
 
 100. Ibid., 50, 58. 
 
 101. Ibid., 69. 
 
 102. Ibid., 137-138. 
 
 103. Ibid., 138. 
 
 104. Ibid., 129, 173, 177. 
 
 105. Ibid., 165. 
 
 106. Which, in Lacanian terms, can be read as entry' into the Symbolic, the Law 
 of the Father. 
 
 107. Ibid., 174. 
 
 108. Ibid., 180. 
 
 240 Notes to Chapter Three 
 
109. Ibid., 182. 
 
 no. Ibid., 187, 205. 
 
 in. “So long as we permit the death penalty at all, let us kill off the right 
 people, the homicidal maniacs and the insane killers. We need not do it vengefully 
 or in bad blood, but rather with relief, once they have been determined to be fit 
 candidates for the gas chamber or the electric chair. Then let us quietly, dispas¬ 
 sionately, painlessly, even apologetically, return them to Mother Earth.” Ibid., 
 J 94 - 
 
 112. Ibid. 
 
 113. Ibid., 50. 
 
 4. True Crime Romance I: A Genre Defiled 
 
 1. Retired Assistant District Attorney Henry Devine, notes from conversation 
 with author, 2 December 1993 .1 am much indebted to Mr. Devine for his cooper¬ 
 ation, to Barry Grennan, chief of the Major Offenses Bureau, District Attorney’s 
 Office, Nassau County, and to the staff of that office for extending me every 
 courtesy. 
 
 2. Fay was killed at the house in Valley Stream, but the body was eventually 
 interred at a house rented just for that purpose. 
 
 3. Beck and Fernandez were given various monickers by the media —the most 
 favored contemporary one being the “Lonely Hearts Killers,” abbreviated for 
 headline brevity by Hearst’s New York Journal American to “Hearts Killers.” 
 
 4. The name is occasionally given in sources as “Dowling,” but here I follow the 
 transcript’s usage. 
 
 5. Mr. Devine particularly recalled the circumstances of the extradition because 
 of the parallel with a recent case in which a man, wanted for murder in New York, 
 was arrested in Oklahoma. Governor Mario Cuomo of New York had apparently 
 requested extradition to save him from a capital charge in that state. Henry De- 
 vine, conversation with author, 2 December 1993. 
 
 6. A charge leveled by the defense throughout the trial and not satisfactorily 
 countered by the prosecution. See the transcript of People v. Fernandez 301 NY 
 302 (1950): vol. 2, cols. 2164-2165; vol. 3, cols. 4597-4599; vol. 5, cols. 7301- 
 7302,7327,7333-7335,7383. 
 
 7. By the 1960s their deeds had paled in comparison with those by such mass 
 killers as Charles Starkweather, Richard Speck, and Charles Manson. 
 
 8. People v. Fernandez , vol. 1, col. 42. 
 
 9. “I was questioned by different officers . . . every state in the U.S. I am sure. 
 Q. Questioned by some officers from the Middle-West? A. Well, every crime that 
 
 Notes to Chapter Four 241 
 
was committed in the U.S., I was asked if I had been the one.” Testimony of Ray 
 Fernandez, People v. Fernandez, vol. 2, col. 3373. 
 
 10. The prosecution only mentioned Myrtle Young (whose “suspicious” death 
 was linked to Beck and Fernandez) and the Downings elliptically and rarely. 
 
 11. This was the prosecution story, developed from Martha’s second, revised 
 statement to police and from the story allegedly told by Beck to the examining 
 psychiatrist for the people, Perry Lichtenstein. See Statement of Martha Beck, 
 3 March 1949, quoted in People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, cols. 10621-10678, and 
 Testimony of Dr. Lichtenstein, vol. 6, cols. 9348-9359. 
 
 12. Essentially this was the defense position. See Summary for the Defense, 
 People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, cols. 10355-10359, and Testimony of Dr. Richard 
 Hoffmann, vol. 5, cols. 9119-9125 passim. 
 
 13. A confusion noted by Judge Ferdinand Pecora in his charge to the jury: 
 “That kind of abnormality, assuming that it exists or is possessed by one charged 
 with crime, does not in and of itself constitute the kind of insanity which under 
 our law will excuse a person from the consequences of an act” ( People v. Fernandez, 
 vol. 6, col. 10884). The term “abnormality'” had entered the arena of forensic 
 psychiatry' with the famous expert defense of Leopold and Loeb marshaled by 
 Clarence Darrow. Darrow, how'ever, w'as not trying to prove insanity and was 
 accepting the legal responsibility of his clients. The deployment of his clients’ 
 “abnormality” was purely' a strategy to mitigate sentence. 
 
 14. Testimony of Ray Fernandez, People v. Fernandez, vol. 3, cols. 5388-5403, 
 5460-5475. 
 
 15. “Well, certainly, the things that he has told us about would make one callous 
 to death, absolutely callous. Death would mean nothing to him.” Summation for 
 the People, People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, col. 10410. 
 
 16. Summation for the Defendants, People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, cols. 10307, 
 10337-10338. 
 
 17. See Colin Wilson and Patricia Pitman, Encyclopaedia of Murder (London: 
 Pan, 1984), 236. 
 
 18. There were also different versions given of the Dowming killings, but these 
 were never tested at trial. 
 
 19. The tale of murder consists both of all other murders, known and unknowm, 
 for which the principals were responsible and the life stories that, as they are told, 
 lead to the execution of their subjects. 
 
 20. Brown, Introduction to Murder, 200. 
 
 21. Who, the story goes, w'as shot in the head by Fernandez. 
 
 22. I have been unable to consult an authoritative source on the Downing 
 murders (i.e., the police files). See Introduction. 
 
 242 Notes to Chapter Four 
 
2 3- Recross Examination of Ray Fernandez, People v. Fernandez, vol. 3, col. 
 3721. 
 
 24. As evidenced by the entry for Beck in a recent “true crime” reference man¬ 
 ual: “ Victims: 4~2o(?). Method: poison, beating, shooting, drowning .” See Segrave, 
 Women Serial and Mass Murderers, 26. 
 
 25. Ralph Willett, The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the U.S.A. (New York: 
 Manchester University Press, 1996), 6-7. Willett’s work is especially useful for 
 deunifying historically and culturally (notably in terms of race and gender) the 
 crime genre. 
 
 26. Testimony of Ann Mason, People v. Fernandez, vol. 1, col. 812. 
 
 27. Joe McGinniss noted the results of a spot poll of North Carolinians in 
 which 81 percent of those contacted ( prior to the 1979 trial) professed knowledge 
 of the so-called Fort Bragg killings. McGinniss wryly observed that it was “rare 
 for 81% of those polled to identify the president of the United States.” Joe 
 McGinniss, Fatal Vision (New York: Putnam, 1983), 494. Even though this high 
 figure is not entirely reliable, it is fair to surmise that a notorious murder is not 
 only big news but is common conversational currency. 
 
 28. That “abnormality” was of prime importance in defining the crime and its 
 severity. One writer would note a couple of years later that the jury, “confused by 
 the psychiatric testimony,” had rendered their guilty verdict on the basis of the 
 “general undesirability of the defendants.” Brown, Introduction to Murder, 179. 
 
 29. New York Journal American, 25 July 1949. 
 
 30. Dorothy Kilgallen, “Mrs. Beck Facing the Chair Worries about Her 
 Weight,” ibid., 28 June 1949. 
 
 31. The more pertinent fact about Graham was that she was left-handed, 
 whereas the blow was struck by a right-handed assailant. See Bernice Freeman 
 Davis and A 1 Hirschberg, The Desperate and the Damned (New York: Crowell, 
 1961). 
 
 32. New York Journal American, 27 June 1949. 
 
 33. Ibid., 25 June 1949. 
 
 34. It is difficult, writing in the 1990s, to find a language to describe these 
 events with historical accuracy. Such terms as “date rape,” “child abuse,” and 
 “sexual harassment” simply did not exist in any meaningful sense during the late 
 1940s, although the activities they describe today (which were then probably 
 experienced differently) certainly did. However, to try to remedy some of the 
 problems facing the historian who must contend with a punitive and expansionist 
 modern discourse on abuse, I’ll let Martha Beck describe how she felt. After the 
 second time her brother forced sex on her, Martha said: “I tried to cleanse myself, 
 but from that day forward I haven’t felt like I’ve been physically clean” (Testi- 
 
 Notes to Chapter Four 243 
 
mony of Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, col. 6456). When Martha even¬ 
 tually told on her brother, her mother blamed her for bringing shame on the 
 family: “she told me that I was a bad girl and I may not be respected; that I had 
 caused the family to lose our self-respect and that of the community; she wouldn’t 
 be able to face any of her friends anymore, and she held it against me” (vol. 4, 
 col. 6461). 
 
 35. A strategy often pursued in the penalty phase of recent capital trials. 
 
 36. New York Journal American, 25 July 1949. 
 
 37. Represented, in part, by the glandular condition they tried to get the expert 
 witnesses to testify to. 
 
 38. Summation for the People, People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, cols. 10463-10464. 
 
 39. New York Journal American, 26 July 1949. 
 
 40. Testimony of Ray Fernandez, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, cols. 5567-5577. 
 
 41. Testimony of Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, col. 6484. 
 
 42. “Her abnormal bodily structure made normal sexual gratification impossi¬ 
 ble, while at the same time her pituitary-ovarian deficiency created unduly strong 
 urges” (Brown, Introduction to Murder, 34). 
 
 43. New York Journal American, 26 July 1949. 
 
 44. Ibid., 1 June 1949. 
 
 45. Ibid., 13 June 1949. 
 
 46. See A. Cranny-Francis, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction 
 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Margaret Jensen, Love’s Sweet Return: The 
 Harlequin Story (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1984). 
 
 47. Dennis Porter, “Backward Construction and the Art of Suspense,” in Glenn 
 Most and William Stowe, eds., The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary 
 Theory (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1983), 328. 
 
 48. And, in one important instance, as nanny. 
 
 49. This summary account is drawn from a series of articles on the Lonely 
 Hearts Killers appearing in the New York Journal American (June-August 1949 
 and February-March 1951). 
 
 50. Testimony of Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, cols. 6499-6501. 
 
 51. New York Journal American, 25 July 1949. 
 
 52. Testimony of Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, col. 6503. It is 
 possible that Beck is using “affair” in the colloquial sense, meaning “that busi¬ 
 ness” or some such. However, her use of “the affair” rather than “that affair” 
 suggests otherwise. 
 
 53. New York Journal American, 25 July 1949. 
 
 54. The defense brought out a lengthy work record from both defendants. 
 Their mobility, and the short duration of some of Fernandez’s jobs, was consistent 
 
 244 Notes to Chapter Four 
 
both with labor demographics in the late 1940s and with the pattern of work in 
 the building industry. See Statement of Ray Fernandez, People’s Exhibit 57, People 
 v. Fernandez, vol. 3. 
 
 5 5. The prosecution contended that Martha lost her position as superintendant 
 of the home for crippled children owing to a “morals” charge: the board of 
 directors had heard of her liaison with Fernandez. Martha testified that she had 
 returned to Florida from New York (where she’d been visiting Ray) to find that 
 she had lost her job; she did not know why. Testimony of Martha Beck, People v. 
 Fernandez , vol. 4, cols. 6840-6848. 
 
 56. Testimony of Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, cols. 6515-6516. 
 
 57. New York Journal American, 30 June 1949. 
 
 58. In one version, Delphine Downing is killed because she surprises Fer¬ 
 nandez without his hairpiece. See Bruce Sanders, “The Incredible Lovers,” in 
 Murder behind the Bright Lights (London: Flerbert Jenkins, 1958), 11 -12. 
 
 59. Fernandez testified that he “never wore a toupee except once for about 15 
 minutes” ( People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, col. 5488). He bought the toupee in Chicago, 
 late in 1948 (vol. 3, col. 4121; vol. 4, col. 5642). 
 
 60. Testimony of Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, col. 6788. 
 
 61. New York Journal American, 26July 1949. 
 
 62. Martha’s own account of her desire for Fernandez is an eminently practical 
 one, bound up in her desire for a trustworthy and kind mate: “it gave me a feeling I 
 had never experienced before — to think that there was a person there that seemed 
 to like my two children . . . that. . . liked me, and it was certain that my children 
 liked him.” Testimony of Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, col. 6788. 
 
 63. Cross-examination of Dr. James McCartney, People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, col. 
 9826-9827. 
 
 64. Summation on Behalf of the People, People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, col. 10432. 
 
 65. New York Journal American, 26 July 1949. 
 
 66. A surprise witness for the prosecution testified that Martha had faked at 
 least one of these suicide attempts in order to get sympathy from Ray. See Testi¬ 
 mony of Dorothy Lynn, People v. Fernandez, vol. 5, cols. 9260-9280. 
 
 67. Fernandez had a wife and children in Spain to whom he would regularly 
 send money. His marriages in the United States were, therefore, bigamous. 
 
 68. Testimony of Ray Fernandez, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, cols. 5753, 5759. 
 
 69. “Q. Are these relationships embarrassing to you? A. Very much so.” Testi¬ 
 mony of Ray Fernandez, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, col. 5569. 
 
 70. Testimony of Martha Beck, Peoplev. Fernandez, vol. 5, cols. 7716-7717. 
 
 71. New York Journal American, 18 August 1949. 
 
 72. “A crowd of 150 persons, most of them women” (ibid., 17 August 1949); 
 
 N otes toChapterFour 245 
 
“precautions were taken to prevent a recurrence of yesterday’s near riot when 150 
 women fought for admission to the trial.. .. [SJtill there was a terrific pressure as 
 the spectators, mostly middle-aged housewives, pressed and pushed before the 
 doors were opened” (ibid., 26 July 1949); “hair was pulled and clothing ripped as 
 the women fought to gain entrance” (ibid., 25 July 1949). 
 
 73. Note, in Star Wormwood, Curtis Bok’s vitriolic jibes at the local towns¬ 
 women’s call for Roger’s blood. Damon Runyan, covering that earlier sensation 
 on Long Island, the April 1927 trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, had this to say 
 about the audience: 
 
 Among the other spectators comfortably chaired, or standing on tired feet, were 
 ladies running from a couple of inches to three yards wide. They were from all 
 parts of Long Island, and the other boroughs of the large and thriving City of 
 New York, the inmates of which are supposed to be so very blase but who cer¬ 
 tainly dearly love their murder cases. 
 
 A big crowd waited in the hallways and outside the courthouse. Tearful females 
 implored the obdurate cops guarding the stairs and the court room doors to ease 
 them through somehow. 
 
 Damon Runyan, “Mrs Snyder and Mr Gray,” in Jonathan Goodman, ed., The 
 Pleasures of Murder (London: Sphere, 1983), 180. Runyan went on to condemn 
 those “solid-looking citizens” with a “morning to waste” as a “fine commentary 
 on what someone has mentioned as our vaunted intelligence.” He also later 
 refused an invitation to the execution that was so capitalized upon by the media 
 (for it was there that a Daily News reporter with an ankle camera photographed 
 Ruth Snyder’s electrocution, an image described in depth in Chapter Two above). 
 
 74. The New York Journal American made this their favorite description for 
 Martha in the week leading up to her execution. See the issues of 2 and 5 March 
 I 95 I> 
 
 75. Quoted in Brown, Introduction to Murder, 149. 
 
 76. Quoted in Paul Buck, The Honeymoon Killers (London: Xanadu, 1990), 
 
 139 - 
 
 77. New York Journal American, 8 March 1951. 
 
 78. Sigmund Engel, quoted ibid., 5 July 1949. 
 
 79. Ibid., 2 July 1949. 
 
 80. Henry Devine, conversation with the author, 2 December 1993. 
 
 81. New York Journal American, 12 October 1950, 5 and 8 March 1951. 
 
 82. Testimony ofXIartha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, cols. 6446-6462. 
 
 83. Summation on Behalf of the People, People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, cols. 10425- 
 10427. 
 
 246 Notes to Chapter Four 
 
84. New York Journal American, 8 March 1951. An earlier report described 
 Martha as the “strong ‘man’ of the hideous team of killers, the aggressor in their 
 sorties of murder, egging the weaker Fernandez on” (ibid., 2 March 1951). 
 
 85. Also executed on 8 March 1951 were John King and Richard Power, elec¬ 
 trocuted for the felony murder of a man in Queens. 
 
 86. Ibid., 8 March 1951. 
 
 87. Leon Racht, “Martha, LastofFour ...” ibid., 9March 1951. 
 
 88. Ibid. 
 
 89. The infinitely more temperate and respectable New York Herald Tribune did 
 print Beck’s charge that the press had represented her as “unfeeling, stupid and 
 moronic,” but even they declined to print the section decrying the abuse of her 
 appearance, despite the fact that the Tribune had refrained from the name-calling 
 that was the specialty of the Hearst press. See the New York Herald Tribune, 
 9 March 1951. 
 
 go. New York Journal American, 28 June 1949. 
 
 91. Leon Racht, “High Court Rejects ‘Hearts’ Killers Plea to Cheat the Chair,” 
 New York Jownal American, 4 March 1951. 
 
 92. Time, 14March 1949, p. 14. 
 
 93. Racht, “High Court Rejects ... Plea.” 
 
 94. Ibid. 
 
 95. New York Journal American, “Hearts Killer’s Cries Bare His Fear of a Lonely 
 Death,” 6 March 1951. 
 
 96. New York Journal American, 5 March 1951. 
 
 97. On 12 June 1949 the New York Journal American devoted a couple of col¬ 
 umns to a man indicted in New Hampshire for “suffocating a girl last summer by 
 cramming her silk panties down her throat.” Another sensation was the nonfatal 
 shooting of the Cubs ballplayer Eddie Waitken by one Ruth Steinhagen, a de¬ 
 voted fan whom he didn’t know. She reported that she’d shot him “for the thrill of 
 it” (ibid., i4June 1949). 
 
 98. Brown, Introduction to Murder, 4. 
 
 99. According to Brown, “90% of all members are women” (ibid., 208). 
 
 100. Ibid., 82-83. 
 
 101. Ibid., 216. 
 
 102. Ibid., 166. 
 
 103. Martha had, after all, been selected from a list of Mother Dinene’s Lonely 
 Hearts by Ray Fernandez. Beck later remarked on the irony of that “joke” played 
 on her by her friend Elizabeth Swanson (sending her name in to Mother Dinene), 
 for “if it hadn’t been for that joke ... I wouldn’t be in the courtroom now.” 
 Testimony of Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, col. 6758. 
 
 Notes to Chapter Four 247 
 
5- True Crime Romance II: Portentous Meetings 
 
 1. For an astute analysis of the cultural work of such a strategy (and of the case 
 in general), see Paula S. Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and 
 Loeb Case in American Culture,” Journal of American History 80 (December 
 1993 )- 
 
 2. Reginald Medlicott, “Paranoia of the Exalted Type in a Setting of Folie a 
 Deux: A Study of Two Adolescent Homicides,” in W. Black and A. Taylor, eds., 
 Deviant Behaviour: New Zealand Studies (London: Heinemann, 1979), 119. Dr. 
 Medlicott made his career on the application of the type to the case of Pauline 
 Parker and Juliet Hulme, who murdered the former’s mother in June 1954. 
 
 3. Brown, Introduction to Murder. 
 
 4. Ibid., 7. 
 
 5. “He became firmly convinced that he possessed supernatural powers, and he 
 took a keen interest in voodoo, Obeah, and other forms of black magic” (ibid., 2- 
 3). This information was apparendy given by one of Fernandez’s sisters, but it 
 remains purely anecdotal. Numerous writers (probably following Brown) told 
 how the Valley Stream house was decorated with voodoo symbols and Catholic 
 paraphernalia arranged into the context of pagan worship (ibid., 118). The de¬ 
 tailed photographs of the crime scene fail to support that claim, showing an 
 ordinary interior with a few holy pictures and a greater number of family portraits 
 adorning the walls of lounge and bedroom. See People v. Fernandez, vol. 7, exhibits 
 48-53. 
 
 6. Brown did note that Fernandez may have been guilty of murder before 
 meeting Martha. At least he was suspected of it by the Spanish authorities. He was 
 apparendy “under indictment in La Linea” (a claim made at the trial that was not 
 supported by evidence). See Brown, Introduction to Murder, 88. 
 
 7. Ibid., 3. 
 
 8. Porter, “Backward Construction and the Art of Suspense,” 328. Emphasis 
 mine. 
 
 9. Fredric Wertham can be so identified in his texts, perhaps most clearly in his 
 analysis of the “serial” child killer, Albert Fish. See Wertham, Show of Violence, 65- 
 99. 
 
 10. Brown, Introduction to Murder, 31. 
 
 11. Ibid., 221-222. 
 
 12. Ibid., 30-31. 
 
 13. Ibid., 99. 
 
 14. The testimony of both Fernandez and Beck made it clear that their sexual 
 life at the outset was not particularly satisfactory; both also denied that they had 
 sex the first time they met. The tale of Martha’s promiscuity and the meaning 
 
 248 Notes to Chapter Five 
 
ascribed to her “frigidity” is completely at odds with anything the couple offered 
 in testimony; the power of that reading is in its very remoteness from the facts. 
 
 15. Ibid., 36. 
 
 16. Her first job was as librarian of the “Women’s Club” in Milton, Florida. See 
 Testimony of Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez , vol. 4, col. 6498. 
 
 17. Brown, Introduction to Murder, 37. 
 
 18. Ibid., 36. 
 
 19. An ill-defined condition the existence of which was debated at the trial. The 
 cause of Martha’s obesity is not resolved in the transcript. 
 
 20. Ibid., 34, 53. 
 
 21. Testimony of Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, cols. 6714-6720. 
 
 2 2. Brown, Introduction to Murder, 227. 
 
 23. Ibid., 166. 
 
 24. Ibid., 108. 
 
 25. Which was a good few years before it was purchased in reality. Ibid., 82. 
 
 26. Pages 129-144 were ripped out of the sole copy of Brown’s book held by the 
 New York Public Library. This irritating and fateful piece of vandalism resulted in 
 a reading of the text that must admit to being more than usually interpretive. 
 
 27. Ibid., 121. 
 
 28. “Fernandez seized Martha’s arm. ‘What’s happened? What did you do?’ he 
 shouted. Martha replied, ‘I don’t know. I had no idea what I was doing’ ” (ibid., 
 120). 
 
 29. Ibid., 121. 
 
 30. Ian Brady of the Moors murderers, as well as Richard Loeb, the “unre¬ 
 deemed” killer friend of Nathan Leopold, are obvious examples. The pattern 
 exists for lesser-known couples: Pauline Parker is commonly depicted as dominat¬ 
 ing her lover Juliet Hulme in the 1954 murder, in Christchurch, New Zealand, of 
 the former’s mother. Such readings must always arise on the back of certain 
 assumptions about —in these examples — class and gender. 
 
 31. H. Montgomery Hyde, United in Crime (London: Heinemann, 1955), 139- 
 143; David Rowan, “The Lonely Hearts” and “The Death House,” in Famous 
 American Crimes (London: Frederick Muller, 1957); Sanders, “The Incredible 
 Lovers.” 
 
 32. Sanders’s account is distinguished in that it claims this honor for the pair 
 throughout the history of modern crime in the West as a whole. 
 
 33. This was a common facet of his work when dealing with executed felons. 
 Montgomery Hyde was staunchly opposed to capital punishment. His reserva¬ 
 tions in the Hearts Killers case recall those of the later case of Barbara Graham: 
 “Martha subsequently asserted that it was not her hand which struck the fatal 
 blow that killed Janet Fay, and some grounds for this belief are provided by the 
 
 Notes to Chapter Five 249 
 
fact that she was left-handed, while Mrs. Fay was killed with a right-handed blow” 
 (Montgomery Hyde, United in Crime, 142-143). 
 
 34. Ibid., 142. 
 
 35. The Honeymoon Killers, 35 mm, 108 min., directed by Leonard Casde and 
 Oliver Wood, 1970. 
 
 36. The first line of the text: “Raymond Fernandez was feeling pleased with life. 
 He had seduced more than twenty women” (Rowan, Famous American Crimes, 82). 
 Rowan’s rather stuffy Englishness is demonstrated here by his assumption that the 
 seduction of twenty women is anything to write home about. 
 
 37. Martha had not, for instance, been “married three times”; nor did she have 
 three children. Rowan also consistently misspelled “Downing” as “Dowling” (yet 
 even Time had managed to screw up the widow’s first name: printing “Deliphene” 
 instead of “Delphine”). See ibid., 83-84. 
 
 38. Ibid., 89. 
 
 39. Roland Barthes, stumbling upon a “Basque style” house in Paris, wrote that 
 he felt as if “this chalet has just been created on the spot, for me, like a magical 
 object springing up in my present life without any trace of the history that has 
 caused it” (quoted in Dean MacCannell, The Tourist [New York: Schocken Books, 
 1989]. r 59 )- 
 
 40. Rowan, Famous American Crimes, 91. 
 
 41. Fernandez heard rumors that Martha was flirting with one of her wardens 
 and, in his fun,’, requested his lawyers to ask that his execution be moved up to 
 dispatch him from his misery. Naturally, this extraordinary request was not se¬ 
 riously considered, but the ruction was sufficient to cause the prison warden to 
 transfer certain of the death house staff and to order the doors between wings 
 closed. The warden’s investigations revealed there was no substance to the story 
 anyway. Buck, The Honeymoon Killers, 138; Rowan, Famous American Crimes, 99- 
 100. 
 
 42. For a detailed discussion of the Rosenbergs’ infringement of that discourse, 
 see my article “The Genealogy of Treason: Ethel Rosenberg and the Masculinist 
 Discourse of Cold War,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 12, no. 1 (1993). 
 
 43. A genre in which the protagonists are largely solitary, masters of duplicity' 
 and strategy', acting without the impediments of conscience or heart. 
 
 44. The spy as lover did appear in the guise of the confessions of Elizabeth 
 Bentley, the so-called Blonde Spy Queen, w ho, with her lover Jacob Golos, sup¬ 
 posedly passed information to the Soviets. Her tale came from her status as 
 communist apostate. In using her love for Golos as the explanation for her com¬ 
 mitment to communism, Bentley, a “woman w r ho loved too much” (and wiio had 
 learned her lesson) became easier to grasp (and harder to impeach) than someone 
 w ho had once been infatuated by an ideology. 
 
 2 50 Notes to Chapter Five 
 
45- Rowan, Famous American Crimes, 105. 
 
 46. The execution drew an audience “in excess of the legal number of wit¬ 
 nesses” (Brown, Introduction to Murder, 187). 
 
 47. Rowan, Famous American Crimes , 104. 
 
 48. Sanders, “The Incredible Lovers,” 13. 
 
 49. Reprinted recently in Richard Glyn Jones, ed., Couples Who Kill: Terrifying 
 True Stories of the World's Deadliest Duos (London: True Crime, 1993). 
 
 50. Wenzell Brown’s Introduction to Murder and Paul Buck’s The Honeymoon 
 Killers are the most extensive. 
 
 51. Sanders, Introduction, Murder behind the Bright Lights, 6. 
 
 52. Partly in response to the furor caused by the execution of Bentley, the Royal 
 Commission on Capital Punishment recommended, six to five, that no one below 
 age twenty-one should be liable to the death penalty. See “Capital Punishment in 
 the Case of Women and Adolescents,” Justice of the Peace and Local Government 
 Review, 17 October 1953. The Homicide Act of 1957 did not, however, imple¬ 
 ment that recommendation. Although the act did more clearly state the condi¬ 
 tions of capital homicide, both Bentley and Ellis would still have been condemned 
 under the terms of the new legislation. 
 
 53. Wertham, Show of Violence, 242. 
 
 54. If the killings of Delphine and Rainelle are taken as a single act. The child 
 was actually killed two days after her mother. 
 
 55. In every other version (following the depositions) Martha gives Delphine a 
 large (though necessarily fatal) dose of barbiturates, after which Ray shoots the 
 widow in the head. 
 
 56. Sanders, “The Incredible Lovers,” 13. 
 
 57. Ibid., 14. 
 
 58. The police arrive at the door of the Downings’ home, now empty but for 
 Ray and Martha, enquiring about a “Mrs. Fay from New York” (ibid., 15). In 
 point of fact, the police had not connected the Fay murder to Beck and Fernandez 
 until after their statements were tendered to the Kent County authorities. 
 
 59. One of her typical lines: “Better put your thinking cap on, Ray. We’ve 
 settled for six thousand bucks and a body. It’s the body we’ve got to dump in a 
 hurry, sweetheart” (ibid., 34). 
 
 60. Ibid., 22. 
 
 61. Not to be confused with its European equivalent in the serie noir. 
 
 62. Ibid., 24. 
 
 63. An entirely appropriate title for Sanders’s purposes when deployed in the 
 context of dominance and submission. 
 
 64. Ibid., 30. 
 
 65. Ibid. 
 
 Notes to Chapter Five 251 
 
66. “She developed the soul-destroying qualities of a smiling ogress” (ibid., 3 3). 
 
 67. Sanders’s true crime account is also completely contrary to the portrait of 
 Martha that emerges from the trial transcript. 
 
 68. The film also owed much, stylistically, to Roman Polanski’s film Repulsion 
 (1965). 
 
 69. Wertham, “It’s Murder,” 33. 
 
 70. Stanley Cohen laid the foundations for an analysis of the “homicidal” 
 tendencies of a society stratified by race and class. See Cohen, Against Criminology 
 (London: Transaction Books, 1988). 
 
 71. See the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administra¬ 
 tion of Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (Washington, D.C.: gpo, 
 T967), as well as the Wickersham Report of 1968 (National Commission on Law 
 Observance and Enforcement, Crime and the Foreign Born [Wickersham Com¬ 
 mission Report, no. 10], Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith Reprints, 1968 [1931]). 
 
 72. Even the most supposedly conservative media were not immune. The super¬ 
 hero comic —for all its patriotism and morals-mongering —underwent profound 
 changes in the 1970s. The most startling evidence for this phenomenon is the 
 transformation of “Captain America” into “The Nomad” when, demoralized by 
 the president’s betrayal of his precepts of high office (a thinly veiled restaging of the 
 Watergate crisis), Cap dons black garb instead of his famous red, white, and blue. 
 
 6. True Crime Romance III: The Honeymoon Killers 
 
 1. Buck mentions the 45,000 pages of court records, but I am doubtful that he 
 read the transcript very closely or in its entirety. In the retelling of the murders, 
 he does use material that has not appeared before, but his acceptance of some of 
 the worst apocrypha and rumor is worrying. 
 
 2. Buck, The Honeymoon Killers, 151. Emphasis mine. 
 
 3. “An alluring dramatization of the shocking real-life ‘Lonely Hearts’ murders 
 that took place in the Sixties [sic],” wrote Richard Skorman. Both the film’s reset¬ 
 ting of the crimes in the 1960s and this critic’s belief that that was when the 
 murders occurred demonstrates how much The Honeymoon Killers is a text of its 
 times. Skorman typed the film as a “crime docudrama.” See Richard Skorman, 
 Ojf-Hollywood Movies: A Film-Lover's Guide (New York: Harmony, 1989), 176. 
 
 4. This exhortation was drawn from his “last official words” and reprinted 
 across the country in the major evening papers. 
 
 5. The filmmakers were poor chemists. Ammonia is actually used to neutralize 
 chlorine. 
 
 6. Buck, The Honeymoon Killers , 145, 131. 
 
 252 Notes to Chapter Five 
 
7. Hugo Adam Bedau, The Death Penalty in America (New York: Anchor, 1964), 
 238-241. 
 
 8. See the Summation for the People, People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, col. 10475. 
 
 9. Testimony of Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, cols. 5828 and 5841. 
 
 10. Although both Martha and Ray testified to Janet Fay’s desire for sex with 
 him, the prosecution refused to accept the picture of a respectable, aged, Catholic 
 widow at the mercy of her long-starved libido: “And then she wants you to believe 
 that she is telling the truth and saying that that poor Irish woman went over to 
 that defendant Fernandez and in honeyed talk of the South, if you please, said to 
 him: ‘Don’t 00 want some sugar, honeychile?’ An Irish woman, living there, 
 apparently most of her life, pulling out a shriveled old breast and using that sort of 
 Southern dialogue” (Summation for the People, People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, cols. 
 10476-10477). Notwithstanding this pointed questioning of Martha’s account, 
 the credibility of the couple’s story of Fay’s affection remains untestable. 
 
 11. Buck, The Floneymoon Killers, 126. 
 
 12. Statement of Ray Fernandez, People v. Fernandez, vol. 3, col. 4070. 
 
 13. Supplementary Statement of Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 3, col. 
 
 4 I 5 4 . 
 
 14. On seeing the peculiar object attached to Janet’s head, Ray is shocked back 
 to his native tongue, crying Jollin!” Martha is more effusive because she has a 
 moment more in which to react and because she, as a woman, is more versed in 
 strategic exchanges, such as flattery. 
 
 15. Buck, The Honeymoon Killers, 143, 156, 157. 
 
 16. Martha testified to a relationship with a Navy man called Carmen. The 
 liaison failed, but he apparently consented to her using his name to bestow a little 
 respectability on the child she was soon to have (to another man). Testimony of 
 Martha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 4, cols. 6665-6681. The existence of Car¬ 
 men has been disputed, but without stating the evidence for disbelief. It seems 
 that many writers were willing to extrapolate from Martha’s confessed lie about 
 the marriage to the idea that Carmen himself was a lie. 
 
 17. The character of Myrtle Young, for instance, gives Ray $4,000 to marry her 
 and make her pregnancy legitimate. Yet despite the up-front nature of the agree¬ 
 ment, she soon tells Martha she is in love and that she thinks they’ll “make a go of 
 the marriage.” Buck, The Honeymoon Killers, 56. 
 
 7. Killing Grounds 
 
 1. “One in eight persons arrested for murder is a woman.” Elizabeth Rap- 
 paport, “Some Questions about Gender and the Death Penalty,” Golden Gate 
 
 Notes to Chapter Seven 253 
 
University Law Review 20 (Fall 1990): 504. By 1993 that percentage is only slightly 
 higher: 9.4 percent of those arrested for homicide are women. U.S. Department 
 of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 199s, 115th ed. (Wash¬ 
 ington, D.C.: gpo, 1996), 207. 
 
 2. An even greater statistical rarity. 
 
 3. There is also a weird typicality in the figure of femininity undone: the 
 “masculinized” female criminal who represents a much more variegated and com¬ 
 plex pool of actual women murderers. See Lynda Hart’s discussion of Aileen 
 Wuornos in her book, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression 
 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 135-154. 
 
 4. Information derived from the figures for 1992 in U.S. Department of Com¬ 
 merce, Statistical Abstract, 1995, 202. 
 
 5. Of the “circumstances” given for homicides investigated, 27.7 percent are 
 listed as “unknown.” It is that figure which is commonly taken to indicate the rate 
 of “stranger killings.” Ibid. However, there has been some dispute about this 
 figure recently. The most current of the fbi’s Uniform Crime Reports has at¬ 
 tempted to factor in a declining rate of “cleared” homicides. According to one 
 commentator, if one takes statistical cognizance of the up to 50 percent of “un¬ 
 cleared” homicides (in the urban centers where the falling clearance rates are 
 most dramatic), then “up to 53 per cent of all homicides are being committed by 
 strangers.” See Adam Wallinsky, “The Crisis of Public Order ," Atlantic Monthly, 
 July 1995, p. 46. 
 
 6. With the highest rate being that of the District of Columbia at 78.5 per 
 100,000 population. The highest urban rate is New Orleans, at 80.3 per 100,000. 
 LhS. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract, 1995, 200-201. 
 
 7. National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Department of Health, Educa¬ 
 tion, and Welfare, Ho?nicide in the United States, 1950-1964 (Washington, D.C.: 
 gpo, 1967). 
 
 8. Brian Lane, Murder Update (London: Robinson, 1991), 12. 
 
 9. Wallinsky, “The Crisis of Public Order,” 47. 
 
 10. U.S. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract, 1995, 14, 93. 
 
 ix. Even discounting death by violence, a black male aged nineteen to forty is 
 three times more likely than his white peer to die before reaching age forty-one. 
 Ibid., 14, 95. 
 
 12. Lane, Murder Update, 12. The Statistical Abstract also indicates that whites in 
 the age range fifteen to thirty-four are more likely to kill themselves or die in 
 motor vehicle accidents than they are likely to be murdered. U.S. Department of 
 Commerce, Statistical Abstract, 1995, 93. 
 
 13. James Baldwin, “The Devil Finds Work,” in The Price of the Ticket (London: 
 Michael Joseph, 1985), 631. 
 
 254 Notes to Chapter Seven 
 
14. As demonstrated by City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co. (1989) and, more 
 recently, the associated ruling in Northeastern Florida Chapter of the Associated 
 General Contractors of America v. City of Jacksonville, Florida (1993). In the former 
 case, the majority found against the constitutionality of “affirmative action” pro¬ 
 grams (viz., a municipal “set-aside” clause guaranteeing to minority business 
 enterprises in the building trade a percentage of business by subcontract). Rich¬ 
 mond, it was shown, is an urban area with a majority African American popula¬ 
 tion. The basis for the Courts finding was the failure of the appellant, the City of 
 Richmond, to establish a prima facie case, for “none of the evidence ... pointed to 
 any identified discrimination in the city’s construction industry, and . . . past 
 societal discrimination alone could not serve as the basis for such a rigid racial 
 preference [as that entailed by the ‘set-aside’ provision].” City of Richmond v.J. A. 
 Croson Co. 488 US 469, 102 L Ed 2d 855 (1989). See also Gordon Clark, “The 
 Legitimacy of Judicial Decision Making in the Context of Richmond v. Croson ,” 
 Urban Geography 13, no. 3 (1992), for an analysis of the implications of that 
 decision. Although the legal issues in the associated case of Florida General Con¬ 
 tractors v. Jacksonville are different (viz., the petitioner’s standing and whether or 
 not the case is moot) the general reasoning is similar; that is, the majority found 
 against the constitutionality of the city’s “set-aside” clause, even after that clause 
 was substantially altered so as to meet exactly the “present effects of past discrimi¬ 
 nation.” See the dissenting opinion of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Harry 
 Andrew Blackmun, Northeastern Florida Chapter of the Associated General Contrac¬ 
 tors of America v. City of Jacksonville, Florida 508 US — , 124 L Ed 2d 586 (1993): 
 602-603. The Court —issues of mootness and standing aside —ruled against the 
 principle of “preferential treatment.” 
 
 15. Pokorak, ‘“Death Stands Condemned’: Justice Brennan and the Death 
 Penalty,” 296. 
 
 16. Ibid., 296-302. 
 
 17. “Baldus found that prosecutors sought the death penalty in 70% of the cases 
 involving black defendants and white victims; 32% of the cases involving white 
 defendants and white victims and 19% of the cases involving white defendants 
 and black victims.” Ibid. 
 
 18. According to Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote the majority opinion, the 
 evidence from the Baldus report which McCleskey’s lawyers presented could not 
 prove that the “decisionmakers in his case acted with discriminatory purpose.” 
 Powell, quoted by David Baldus et al. in Kermit Hall, ed., The Oxford Companion to 
 the Supreme Court (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 703. Baldus et al. 
 go on to remark that “one surprising effect of this Fourteenth Amendment hold¬ 
 ing is that equal protection claims of purposeful race discrimination in death 
 sentence cases will now be subjected to a far heavier burden of proof than is 
 
 Notes to Chapter Seven 255 
 
applied in ordinary jury discrimination and employment discrimination cases” 
 (ibid.). 
 
 19. The law was overruled later on other grounds. However, Pace & Cox is still 
 used to demonstrate the requirements of equal protection. Pace & Cox v. State of 
 Alabama (Ala 1 S Ct 637, 106 US 583 27 L Ed 207, 1883). Emphasis mine. 
 
 20. It might be argued, too, that this indifference also applies to the poor in 
 general and to women and children. See Chapter Eight below. 
 
 21. Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 10. 
 
 22. See Martin Amis, “The Killings in Atlanta,” in Sebastian Wolfe, ed., The 
 Book of Murder (London: Xanadu, 1992), 190; Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not 
 Seen, 10-13. 
 
 23. Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 6. 
 
 24. Ibid., 5. 
 
 25. “[W]hat was one to make of a ‘pattern’ that included, as cause of death, 
 gunshot wounds, strangulation, head injury, stabbed, asphyxiation, and undeter¬ 
 mined?” Ibid., 64. 
 
 26. “In the last twenty months, twenty children have been murdered in At¬ 
 lanta” (Amis, “The Killings in Atlanta,” 190). 
 
 27. Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 15. Emphasis mine. 
 
 28. Ibid., 72. 
 
 29. Ibid., 39. 
 
 30. See Bernard Headley on the “Race-Class-Region dialectic” in his article 
 “Killings That Became ‘Tragedy’: A Different View of What Happened in At¬ 
 lanta, Georgia,” Social Justice 16, no. 4 (1989): 67-70. 
 
 31. I use the term “black” here, rather than the more contemporary “African 
 American,” in deference to Baldwin’s own use of the term. 
 
 32. “I could not interview her [Ms. Camille Bell, the mother of the fourth 
 victim, Yusef Bell] because I simply did not know what to say to the mother of a 
 murdered child, still less what to ask” (Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 54). 
 
 33. For an interesting and complex view of this form of hypertypicality, see 
 Mark Seltzer, “Serial Killers I,” Differences 5 (Spring 1993) and “Serial Killers II: 
 The Pathological Public Sphere,” Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1995). 
 
 34. That silence may not and need not be literal. Even with pages of testimony 
 from the accused, and with all the confessions and statements, there is always so 
 much doubt about the relationship of the “facts” to these statements that the 
 intervention of an “interpreter” is essential. 
 
 35. Many infamous American criminals were aficionados of detective fiction 
 and/or true crime. Leopold and Loeb lifted their ransom note from a recently 
 published mystery story. Loeb actually followed around the crime reporters who 
 were investigating the murder (for which he and his lover were responsible), 
 
 2 56 Notes to Chapter Seven 
 
proposing various theories and scenarios of the crime. See Fass, “Making and 
 Remaking an Event,” 922, 95on62. Bonnie Parker was so taken with the myth of 
 the oudaw that she took to writing her own ballads about the Barrow gang, verse 
 which was later published in the Dallas Evening Journal. Martha Beck apparently 
 read stacks of true crime and detective magazines in prison. 
 
 36 .1 shall discuss later in this chapter the very significant difference of Millett’s 
 The Basement in this regard. 
 
 37. Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 125. Emphasis mine. 
 
 38. For Baldwin’s impression of Williams, see ibid., 75-77, 111-112. 
 
 39. Ibid., 16, 71-72,106. 
 
 40. Ibid., 16, 72. 
 
 41. Feminist criminologists have intensively critiqued that school of expert 
 opinion which has made its fame from tabulating the “causes” of the psycho¬ 
 pathology of serial killers. See Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, The Lust 
 To Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder (London: Polity Press, 1987); 
 Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime. Dr. Joel Norris, an “expert” in the psychopathology 
 of the serial killer, suggests that a serial killer is likely to have been either sexually 
 abused, unloved by his mother, or to have suffered some organic brain defect. 
 Believing such preconditions policeable, Norris treats serial murder as, in his 
 words, a “disease” —the cure for which can be found in regulating the maternal 
 environment from the perinatal period onward. See J. Norris, Sexual Killers: The 
 Growing Menace (New York: Dolphin, 1988), 1-21. 
 
 42. For a fine example of the interdependence of both critiques, see Sherene 
 Razack, “What Is to Be Gained by Looking White People in the Eye? Culture, 
 Race and Gender in Cases of Sexual Violence,” Signs 19, no. 4 (1994). 
 
 43. Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 125, 95. 
 
 44. Ibid., 56, 85. 
 
 45. Baldwin’s own opinion of liberalism was formed by his witnessing of the 
 cataclysmic betrayal and intellectual perfidy of Cold War liberalism. Writing of 
 the intellectual community that, by and large, allowed or even assisted in the 
 destruction of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, Baldwin opined that “their perfor¬ 
 mance, then, yet more than the combination of ignorance and arrogance with 
 which this community has always protected itself against the deepest implications 
 of Black suffering, persuaded me that brilliance without passion is mere sterility.” 
 (Baldwin, “No Name in the Street,” in The Price of the Ticket, 465). 
 
 46. Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 79. 
 
 47. Baldwin, “Words of a Native Son,” in The Price of the Ticket, 400. 
 
 48. Compare, for instance, two representative texts on American violence from 
 the liberal and the neoconservative eras, respectively. Charles Silberman’s Crimi¬ 
 nal Violence: Criminal Justice (New York: Random House, 1978) was very much a 
 
 Notes to Chapter Seven 257 
 
product of “new criminological” liberalism, representing its most sophisticated 
 edge. Silberman’s analysis of the effects of poverty and racial oppression on crime 
 and the administration of criminal justice was an incisive one. His work refuses 
 definitively the “othering” process of other sociological tracts bent on containing 
 the “underclass,” and his criticism of the criminal justice system reflects the 
 radical assumption that “criminality” and injustice are not the sole reserve of 
 those parts of society that are the object of policing. Brown’s No Duty to Retreat , on 
 the other hand, is very much a neoconservative tract, regardless of the liberal 
 overtones of its historical analysis of the implications of the right to self-defense in 
 American history. Brown seems to accept two mutually distinct groups: the law- 
 abiding citizens (who deplore crime and support “tougher measures”) and the 
 criminal “underclass” (pp. 139-142). 
 
 49. Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 38. 
 
 50. “There is no such thing as a Negro Problem — but simply a menaced boy.” 
 Baldwin, “Words of a Native Son,” 400). 
 
 51. U.S. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract, 1995, 99. 
 
 52. This figure was thought to be a low estimate, based only on the bodies 
 actually found. See Diana Russell and Candida Ellis, “Annihilation by Murder 
 and by the Media: The Other Atlanta Femicides,” in Jill Radford and Diana 
 Russell, eds., Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (New York: Twayne, 1992). 
 
 53. Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 44, 36, 33. 
 
 54. “For the action of the White Republic, in the lives of Black men, has been, 
 and remains, emasculation” (ibid., 21). 
 
 55. Ibid., 19. 
 
 56. See Baldwin on the killing of Emmett Till for whistling at a w hite w'oman. 
 Ibid., 40-41. 
 
 57. Ibid., 19. 
 
 58. Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door was also much preoccupied with the 
 devastations caused by that morally duplicitous culture of manhood. While xMot- 
 ley’s ideas on masculinity did not engage the overtly racial category of “sorriness,” 
 it was, I believe, informed by it. 
 
 59. Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 17, 20-21. 
 
 60. Ibid., 21. 
 
 61. There is a great deal of recent feminist scholarship that critiques the con¬ 
 struction of black “consciousness” and “experience” as w r ell as the racist, ethno¬ 
 centric, and colonizing impulse of much of Western feminism. See, for example, 
 bell hooks, Ain ’tla Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 
 1981); Paula Giddings, When and Where 1 Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race 
 and Sex in America (New r York: Bantam Books, 1984); Hazel Carby, Reconstructing 
 Womanhood: The Emergence of the African-American Woman Novelist (New York: 
 
 258 Notes to Chapter Seven 
 
Oxford University Press, 1987); and, for more general critiques of the inclusive 
 strategies of feminism, Denise Riley, “Am I that Name?" Feminism and the Category 
 of Women in Histoty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and 
 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: 
 Routledge, 1990). 
 
 62. Carby critiqued at length a nineteenth-century concept of woman that, by 
 its definition, excluded black women as the female black animal. See Carby, Recon¬ 
 structing Womanhood. 
 
 63. “If women dream less than men — for men know very little about a woman’s 
 dreams — it is certainly because they are so swiftly confronted with the reality of 
 men.” Baldwin is here speculating in the generic; he is also idealizing and natu¬ 
 ralizing the figure of “unfathomable” woman. Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not 
 Seen, 20. 
 
 64. For an analysis of the hegemony of the “much man,” see bell hooks, “Re¬ 
 constructing Black Masculinity,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: 
 South End Press, 1989). 
 
 65. Baraka, quoted ibid., 98. 
 
 66. Baldwin, “Here Be Dragons,” in The Price of the Ticket, 683, 685, 681. 
 
 67. Ibid., 680. 
 
 68. Of his early casual sexual liaisons, Baldwin remarked with sadness that 
 “sexual rumor concerning blacks had preceded me” (ibid., 683). 
 
 69. “[W]hich, as I have understood it, simply means our endless connection 
 with, and responsibility for, each other” (Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 
 122). 
 
 8. Ghosts 
 
 1. See Allison Morris and Ania Wilczynski, “Rocking the Cradle: Mothers 
 Who Kill Their Children,” in Birch, ed., Moving Targets. 
 
 2. See Rappaport, “Some Questions about Gender and the Death Penalty,” 
 
 554 - 5 6 5 ' 
 
 3. Millett, The Basement, 247. 
 
 4. West and Fenstermaker have developed a useful analytic model for under¬ 
 standing the constructive power of race, class, and gender in culture. That model 
 gets away from influential but inaccurate mathematical metaphors for the inter¬ 
 relationship of these constructs, promoting instead an ethnomethodological un¬ 
 derstanding of the “situated accomplishment,” between specific individuals in 
 discrete contexts, of the behavior that simultaneously defines, classifies, and re¬ 
 produces such constructs. For West and Fenstermaker, no one is exempt from the 
 
 Notes to Chapter Eight 259 
 
constructive power of these three categories which, as cultural constructs, are 
 mechanically similar. See Candace West and Sarah Fenstermaker, “Doing Differ¬ 
 ence,” Gender and Society 9, no. 1 (February 1995). 
 
 5. Perhaps the most exemplary general feminist studies of women who kill are 
 Jones, Women Who Kill; Birch, ed., Moving Targets; and, more recently, Kerry 
 Greenwood, ed., The Thing She Loves: Why Women Kill (St. Leonards, N.S.W.: 
 Allen and Unwin, 1996). There are many feminist studies of “spousal homicide” 
 and the battered women’s defense, as well as analyses of specific cases. In addition, 
 there is a substantial body of work in the true crime genre, dealing with women 
 who kill, “black widows femmes fatales, etc. In the latter group is an extensive 
 literature that treats the continuum of men’s violence against women, including 
 sexual and “domestic” murder. See, for example, Cameron and Frazer, The Lust To 
 Kill; Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime; Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of 
 Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978); Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Vio¬ 
 lence (Cambridge: Polity, 1988); and Jill Radford and Diana Russell, eds., Femicide: 
 The Politics of Woman Killing. The theorists Susan Griffin, Andrea Dworkin, and 
 Catherine McKinnon, though addressing the phenomenon of men’s sexual vio¬ 
 lence more generally, have contributed significantly to the conceptualization of 
 what Radford and Russell call “femicide.” There are also, of course, “nonfemi¬ 
 nist” works on the subject of women’s violent deaths at the hands of men. This 
 scholarship issues from within the criminological discipline and is concerned with 
 “trends” in spousal homicide or with the psychopathology of sexual murderers. 
 
 6. Jill Radford, “Introduction,” in Radford and Russell, eds., Femicide: The 
 Politics of Woman Killing (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1992), 4. 
 
 7. Feminine subjectivity and the question of “victim agency” are intelligently 
 canvassed in an article by Janice Haaken concerned with the phenomena of hys¬ 
 teria and multiple personality disorder, respectively, and the relationship of both 
 to authorizing narratives of trauma. See Plaaken, “Sexual Abuse, Recovered 
 Memory, and Therapeutic Practice: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Perspective,” So¬ 
 cial Text 40 (1994): 115 -145. 
 
 8. Millett, The Basement, i. 
 
 9. Ibid., 2. 
 
 10. Ibid. 
 
 11. Ibid. 
 
 12. Ibid. 
 
 13. Ibid., 14. 
 
 14. Ann E. Imbrie, Spoken in Darkness: Small-town Murder and a Friendship 
 beyond Death (London: Penguin, 1994), 191. 
 
 15. Millett, The Basement, 3,4, 6. 
 
 260 Notes to Chapter Eight 
 
16. For Jenny’s complicity, see ibid., 79, 246-247, 283-286. 
 
 17. When Gertrude Baniewski agreed to take on the care of Sylvia and Jenny 
 Likens, she was already sole caretaker for her own family of seven children, one of 
 whom was an infant. 
 
 18. Ibid., 221, 78. 
 
 19. Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 8. 
 
 20. Millett, The Basement, 14. 
 
 21. Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 79. 
 
 22. Millett, The Basement, 100. 
 
 23. Ibid., 3. 
 
 24. Ibid., 131. 
 
 25. Gertrude had apparently been abused by both her husbands and by her 
 more recent boyfriend. 
 
 26. Ibid., 259. 
 
 27. Ibid., 290-291. 
 
 28. For the problem of this negative definition, see Georges Canguilheim on 
 the instability of the normative standard in the “healthy man.” Canguilheim, The 
 Normal and The Pathological. 
 
 29. She never came right out and accused any of the children, but merely said 
 that she had been asleep or absent or busy during much of the fatal persecution of 
 Sylvia: 
 
 Q: Are you telling the jury your children did it? 
 
 A: No, I am not telling the jury my children did it. 
 
 Q: Who else was in the house? 
 
 A: There were a number of children in the house. 
 
 Testimony of Gertrude Baniewski, quoted in Millett, The Basement, 133. 
 
 30. Ibid., 258. 
 
 31. Ibid., 256-263. 
 
 32. According to Diane Shoemaker in the Indianapolis News, 2 November 1965, 
 quoted ibid., 64. 
 
 33. Ibid., 31. 
 
 34. Ibid., 329-331. 
 
 35. This is evident in a number of ways, but it is perhaps most starkly evidenced 
 by the treatment meted out to African American and Hispanic women as mothers 
 and potential mothers. See Jennifer Terry, “The Body Invaded: Medical Sur¬ 
 veillance of Women as Reproducers,” Socialist Review 19, no. 3 (1989). 
 
 36. Wertham, Show of Violence, 213. 
 
 37. As defined in a recent text: “the logic of opposite extremes and ideological 
 norms of female behaviour combine either to deny her any agency, to make her 
 
 Notes to Chapter Eight 261 
 
the innocent victim of a psychopathic megalomaniac, or to cast her as essentially 
 wicked.” Helen Birch, “If Looks Could Kill: Myra Hindley and the Iconography 
 of Evil,” in Birch, ed., Moving Targets, 61. 
 
 38. Millett, The Basement , 99. 
 
 39. Ibid., 105, 58,43. 
 
 40. Sylvia was tortured with whatever came to hand: she was submerged in 
 scalding water, forbidden to use the toilet, had a Coke bottle forced up her vagina. 
 In one incident she was whipped with a piece of curtain railing. 
 
 41. Ibid., 199. 
 
 42. Ibid., 70. 
 
 43. The underground classic movie The Night Porter is a complex exposition of 
 this particular body of ideas. Its plot pivots around the collapse of sadomasochism 
 as fetish into the institutionalized sadism of Nazi fascism. 
 
 44. Ibid., 77. Emphasis mine. 
 
 45. The preceding quote continues: “What sixteen-year-old girl has not al¬ 
 ready been undermined by the guilt of modesty, the shame of sexuality? An indoc¬ 
 trination of terrible consequences, in these circumstances even mortal” (ibid.). 
 
 46. Ibid., 247. Emphasis mine. 
 
 47. Ibid., 11. 
 
 48. Ibid. 
 
 49. Ibid., 14. 
 
 50. Ibid., 54. 
 
 51. Ibid. 
 
 52. Imbrie, Spoken in Darkness, 199-200. 
 
 53. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard 
 Howard (London: Fontana, 1984), 79. 
 
 54. This is evidenced by the appearance recently of a number of works re¬ 
 producing the archives of police photographers whose oeuvre consists largely of 
 crime and accident scenes. These gruesome, evanescent, and sometimes beautiful 
 images seem to appeal both as art and as sensation. For a brief review essay 
 detailing the phenomenon, see Ralph Rugoff, “Crime Seen ,” Art and Text, no. 55 
 (1996): 34-35. Also see Luc Sante, Evidence (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and 
 Giroux, 1992); Eugenia Parry Janis, “They Say I and I Mean Anybody,” in Harm's 
 Way: Lust and Madness and Murder and Mayhem (Santa Fe: Twin Palms), 1994. 
 
 55. Millett, The Basement, 55. 
 
 56. Ibid., 54. 
 
 57. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 65. 
 
 58. Millett, The Basement, 105. 
 
 59. There are slightly different issues involved with her re-creation of the 
 murderer, Gertrude Baniewski. Although the murderer survived the murder, was 
 
 262 Notes to Chapter Eight 
 
tried for her crime and jailed, her living through and beyond the murder changed 
 her. The Gertrude that Millett envisions is the Gertrude of the months of torture, 
 a different person. That demarcation between Gertrude, the murderer, and the 
 later Gertrude is quiet clearly indicated by Millett’s discussion of the photographs 
 taken of her during the trial: “[I]n all succeeding photographs through the course 
 of the trial her face loses, magically, its haunted quality, her body gains weight, 
 takes shape, grows in health, flourishes.... There is nearly something flirtatious 
 in her energy. She has become ‘normal,’ acceptable, credible, a woman now in 
 place of the wraith at the time of her apprehension” (ibid., 16). 
 
 60. Ibid., 67. 
 
 61. Ibid. 
 
 62. Ibid., 68. 
 
 63. Ibid. 
 
 64. Ibid. 
 
 65. Ibid. 
 
 66. Even the rose the girl carries is an unlikely gift, if a gift from Sylvia. It is, 
 instead, very much a late-sixties token: a gift from a younger to an older lesbian 
 who is also a feminist and an artistic “patron.” 
 
 67. Ibid., 247. 
 
 9. The Cast in Order of Disappearance 
 
 1. Federal statute still allows the sentence of death for acts of treason against the 
 state. That statutory right has not been exercised since the executions of Julius 
 and Ethel Rosenberg in June 1953. 
 
 2. Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, p. 1. Although Lesser’s work, like Joel Black’s, 
 examines the figure of the murderer in texts derived from a variety of cultures and 
 periods, the starting point for her analysis (in terms both of her own “interest” 
 and the choice of her primary material) is the cultural phenomenon of murder in 
 modern America. 
 
 3. Ibid., 12. Emphasis mine. 
 
 4. “Crip,” quoted ibid. 
 
 5. “Events can become a ‘story’— news, in that sense, can become art —only 
 when the case is closed and the pattern is viewed in retrospect” (ibid., 16-17). 
 
 6. Ibid., 25. 
 
 7. Ibid., 30-31. 
 
 8. Consider the recent Phil Donahue program that previewed the execution of 
 David Lawson in Raleigh, North Carolina. Donahue s characteristic high-energy 
 style was fueled by an obvious frustration at not being allowed to film the execu- 
 
 Notes to Chapter Nine 263 
 
tion for the show ( Donahue , “The Execution of David Lawson,” 15 June 1994). It 
 is worth noting that Donahue was less than clear about what particular purpose he 
 wished to serve by broadcasting the execution, despite his appeal to his First 
 Amendment rights to do so. 
 
 9. See Lionel Dahmer, A Father's Stoty: One Man's Anguish at Confronting the 
 Evil in His Son ([London]: Little, Brown, 1994). 
 
 10. Which begs the important question of what place sexuality has in the 
 figuring of the murderer in the foreground of the tale of murder. As that very 
 question is the basis of my next work, I will defer its full analysis, although the 
 germ of that analysis can, I hope, be found here. 
 
 11. Dahmer,/! Father's Story, 54. Emphasis mine. 
 
 12. Which Thomas Cook heatedly points out in his preface to the work. Upon 
 opening the book, the reader is immediately struck by the dedication: a lengthy 
 list of names that — one realizes as one counts them dirough — are the names of 
 Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims. A portion of the proceeds of the book’s sale was given to 
 the families of the murdered. 
 
 13. For an analysis of the process of storytelling — as a means of dealing with 
 the remote but possible threat of murder, as chronicle, and as entertainment — see 
 Amma A. Davis, “Narrative Reactions to Brutal Murders: A Case Study,” Western 
 Folklore 49 (January 1990). Davis found that the local response to three women 
 having been rape-murdered featured “two clear narrative cycles”: “The first cycle 
 included reactionary rumors and narratives that took several forms — cautionary 
 stories, stories of vicarious involvement (usually in the subgenre of Narrow Es¬ 
 capes), and stories of accusation — and were told before the murderer was ap¬ 
 prehended. Almost all of the narratives were told by women” (p. 100). Also see 
 Bill Ellis on the tenacity of the folk renderings of a particular tale of murder in the 
 face of the much more banal alternative aired in the actual trial (“Death by 
 Folklore,” 209-212). 
 
 14. Lesser would understand “quality” in its fullest sense, not merely as the 
 refinement of the technicalities of the text’s production that KQED used as an 
 argument for the inclusion of the video camera as a tool of the reporter’s trade. 
 
 15. Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, 156-215, 250. 
 
 16. Ibid., 212, 235. 
 
 17. See Lesser on “The Sleaze Factor,” ibid., 93-120. 
 
 18. “The very techniques on which the telling of a murder tale relies —fore¬ 
 shadowing, delay, irony, surprise, a sense of determinism, the theatrical immortal¬ 
 ization of the main character — are techniques that play with the notion of time” 
 (ibid., 234). 
 
 19. As there is no inherent “nature” to the document, it could be more accurate 
 
 264 Notes to Chapter Nine 
 
to propose that a live broadcast would position the audience in a significantly 
 different way than would a delayed broadcast. 
 
 20. Compare my own analysis with Lesser’s discussion of the “strange relation” 
 of the photograph to murder: “Photography focuses on surfaces, murder stems 
 from and speaks to hidden depths; photography celebrates distance and removal, 
 murder condemns the failure to interfere; photography is commemorative, mur¬ 
 der seeks oblivion; photography freezes time, making a moment last forever, 
 whereas murder creates irrevocable change” (ibid., 175). I disagree with the polar¬ 
 ity of the relation described here. Lesser falls short of the point in her description 
 of the viewer of the photograph bringing to the text that vital mortality—“the 
 passage of time” —which is not implicit in the medium itself. The relativity sim¬ 
 ply does not work, because the photograph is always about the viewer as much as it 
 is about the subject. Photography does not “freeze time,” it testifies to time’s 
 passing. It assumes both that someone must see and that what is seen is already lost. 
 See Barthes, Camera Lucida, 79. 
 
 21. As reported on 3 November 1994. The television movie was entitled With¬ 
 out Warning. It is tempting to suspect that the only people sucked in were those 
 who turned on their tv sets halfway through the movie (say at the scene where the 
 tv cameras report from the site of the impact), in which case the degree of 
 misapprehension is perhaps more comprehensible. Viewers may have assumed 
 they were seeing an actual news report. It is impossible, however, to speculate on 
 just how much of the fictional “frame” to the story of catastrophe was ignored by 
 viewers because of the tenacity of their belief, their hope even, that such things 
 could happen. 
 
 2 2. As evidenced by the statutory construction of first-degree murder and the 
 “aggravating” and “mitigating” factors raised in the penalty phase of capital trials. 
 
 23. See Lesser’s reply to a friend of hers who wondered, angrily, “What is all 
 this closure business?” (Pictures at an Execution , 258). 
 
 24. Ibid., 252. 
 
 25. Ibid., 224. Emphasis mine. 
 
 26. The phrase “discourse of power” adequately conveys the breadth of the 
 institutional and cultural mechanisms that govern the final result of the narrowly 
 “judicial” process which decides whether a murderer (a) is indicted for first- 
 degree murder, ( b ) receives a recommendation for death by the jury, (c) is sen¬ 
 tenced to death by the trial judge, or (d) does not have the sentence commuted on 
 appeal. All of these stages are influenced by extrajudicial considerations, no mat¬ 
 ter what the law may claim about the hermetic nature of due process. While all 
 punishment may be said to be arbitrary as applied under the present legal system, 
 the application of the death penalty is relatively more arbitrary when one con- 
 
 Notes to Chapter Nine 265 
 
siders the potentially irrevocable end to what is — till the final moment — a judicial 
 guessing game. 
 
 2 7. Jacoby, Wild Justice. 
 
 28. Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, 225. 
 
 29. Ibid., 3, 232, 248. 
 
 30. Fredric Wertham, William March, and Kate Millett are examples from my 
 own analysis. 
 
 31. Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, 249. Emphasis mine. 
 
 32. “There was a panel discussion afterward about whether he jerked or 
 twitched, whether he lowered his head or moved it to the right, whether his left 
 finger moved.” Dr. Calvin Frederick, quoted ibid., 249-250. 
 
 33. Judge Frankel, quoted in Daniel Komstein, “Twisted Vision: Janet Mal¬ 
 colm’s Upside Down View of the Fatal Vision Case,” Cardozo Studies in Law and 
 Literature 1, no. 2 (1989): 152. Naturally, I also strongly disagree with Kornstein’s 
 contention that “truth begins, journalistically and legally, with the facts.” 
 
 34. Not all of which were signed, although all were admitted as evidence. 
 
 35. “[Ojnce you have been sentenced and serve your time ... no other state 
 can bring the charge against you that you have mentioned previously to me.” 
 Thus Martha Beck characterized the offer allegedly made by Prosecutor Roger 
 McMahon to her in Michigan, should she confess to the Fay murder. See Testi¬ 
 mony ofMartha Beck, People v. Fernandez, vol. 5, cols. 7310-7311. 
 
 36. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction; Foucault et al., 
 eds., 1 , Pieire Riviere, 206-210; Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power 
 and Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 
 esp. 214-217. 
 
 37. Who, when they came to investigate a neighbor’s complaint of suspicious 
 goings-on, had found the bodies of Delphine and Rainelle Downing cemented 
 into the cellar of the widow’s Grand Rapids home. The pair arrested Beck and 
 Fernandez, who were still on the premises. 
 
 38. Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer (New York: Knopf, 1990), 
 161. 
 
 39. Gary Gilmore and Jack Henry Abbott could be taken as examples here. Of 
 course, both had in common their relationship with Norman Mailer, although 
 Gilmore’s relationship was one that he —in fact —knew nothing about. Much of 
 what we know about Gilmore’s “philosophical” nature is the result of Mailer’s 
 mediation. Abbott is quite another matter. On the murders of Max Jensen and 
 Ben Bushnell by Gary Gilmore, see Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast: 
 Letters from Prison (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 129-134; also see Jack Henry 
 Abbott and Naomi Zack, My Return (New York: Prometheus, 1987). 
 
 40. In 1976 Gaiy r Gilmore, who would be the first American to be executed 
 
 266 Notes to Chapter Nine 
 
domestically since the moratorium, obstructed his own appeal process in order to 
 bring about a speedy execution by firing squad in the state of Utah. 
 
 41. Mailer had Barry Farrell ruminate on Gilmore’s love of “literary questions 
 and highly formulated approaches,” concluding that Gilmore was attracted to 
 them because they “dignified his situation.” Norman Mailer, The Executioner's 
 Song (London: Arrow, 1980), 802. Yet Gilmore’s esoteric response to the situation 
 in which he found himself, and his reflection upon the murders, was at times less 
 than dignifying. The interviews show that —even while ruminating on his “re¬ 
 morse” and what the murders meant to him — Gilmore would forget or mispro¬ 
 nounce the names of the men he’d killed (p. 693). That callousness demonstrates 
 that Gilmore was figuring himself as the murderer, and his concentration on that 
 project demolished the murdered yet again. 
 
 42. Quoted in Black, Aesthetics of Murder, 7. 
 
 43. Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, 134. 
 
 44. Ibid., 17. 
 
 45. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Knopf, 1992), 179. 
 
 46. Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer, 45-54, 141-143. 
 
 47. Harper Lee did nearly all the research in the township of Holcombe, while 
 Capote confined himself to the officers of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, 
 and, of course, Richard (“Dick”) Hickock and Perry Smith. This division of labor 
 seems to suggest a number of things about the assumed gifts (sympathy? identity 
 of interest?) of female and male interviewers, respectively. One wild card in that 
 neat division of roles along gender lines is the sexuality of both interviewers: 
 Capote was homosexual and Lee a lesbian. The supposed lines of identification 
 become a good deal more surprising if we take this information into account. 
 (While it is arguable that their “queerness” might not be immediately or easily 
 identifiable or apparent, it should be taken as given that one’s sexuality is not — 
 even when closeted — merely a garb that one can doff at will.) 
 
 48. Neither Gilmore nor Hickock nor Smith become, in Lesser’s phrase, “inno¬ 
 cent victims.” 
 
 49. Norman Mailer, “Preface” to Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast, xi. 
 
 50. Mailer’s correspondence with Jack Abbott began “sometime in the middle 
 of working on The Executioners Song” (ibid., ix). 
 
 51. Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast, 126. 
 
 52. Including Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, and Robert Beausoleil 
 of the Manson gang. 
 
 53. Truman Capote, “Handcarved Coffins: A Non-fiction Account of an Amer¬ 
 ican Crime,” in Music for Cha?neleons ((New York: Random House, 1980). 
 
 54. Truman Capote, “And Then It All Came Down,” in Sebastian Wolfe, ed., 
 The Book of Murder (London: Xanadu, 1992), 19. 
 
 Notes to Chapter Nine 267 
 
55- George Orwell, “The Hanging,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and 
 Letters of George Orwell: An Age Like This, Kj2o-1940 (London: Seeker and War¬ 
 burg, 1968). 
 
 56. “His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was 
 falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow 
 graves and the grey wall, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — 
 reasoned even about puddles.” Ibid., 46. 
 
 57. Dahrner, A Father's Story, 240. 
 
 58. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body , 434. 
 
 59. Dennis Nilsen, quoted in “Nilsen’s Inferno,” Vanity Fair ; November 1991. 
 
 Appendix 
 
 1. Summary of Statement of Martha Beck, 3 March 1949, Michigan, People v. 
 Fernandez, vol. 3, cols. 3850-3864; vol. 6, cols. 10621-10637. There is little 
 significant variation between accounts of the disposal of the body. 
 
 2. It was an unsigned statement, and its veracity was denied by the defense once 
 it was introduced over their objections. 
 
 3. Summary of Revised Statement of Martha Beck, 11 March 1949, People v. 
 Fernandez, vol. 3, cols. 4146-4166. 
 
 4. Statement of Raymond Fernandez, 3 March 1949, Michigan, People v. Fer¬ 
 nandez, vol. 3, cols. 4065-4074. Ray and Martha disagreed as to when they drank 
 the Three Feathers whisky’. Ray puts it before the strangling, Martha after they’d 
 laid the body out in the back room. See vol. 3, col. 3864. 
 
 5. Testimony of Ray Fernandez, Direct and Cross, 14 July-20 July 1949, People 
 v. Fernandez, vol. 4, cols. 5839-5849, 5957-5969, 6307-6320. 
 
 6. Direct Testimony of Martha Beck, 24 July-28 July 1949, People v. Fernandez, 
 vol. 4, cols. 7121-7124. 
 
 7. People v. Fernandez, vol. 5, cols. 7734-7738. 
 
 8. People v. Fernandez, vol. 5, cols. 7271-7287. 
 
 9. Summation on Behalf of the People, People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, col. 10497. 
 
 10. Testimony of Dr. Lichtenstein, People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, cols. 9348-9359. 
 
 11. The coroner suggested that Fay had died from the fractured larynx, rather 
 than the head wounds. 
 
 12. Peoplev. Fernandez, vol. 6, cols. 10543-10556. 
 
 13. Summation on Behalf of the Defendants, People v. Fernandez, vol. 6, col. 
 
 1 °3 59 - 
 
 14. Statement of Martha Beck to Dr. Richard Hoffmann, quoted in Brown, 
 Introduction to Murder, 199-200. 
 
 268 Notes to Chapter Nine 
 
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Index 
 
 Abbott, Jack Henry, 206, 266n39 
 Adolescence, 30, 32, 51, 228m6 
 Aesthetics, 10, 15-16, 19-28, 153, 197, 
 204 
 
 A esthetics ofMurder, 24-28 
 Antidiscrimination. See Discrimination 
 and affirmative action 
 American Tragedy , 31-33 
 Atlanta Child Killings, 10, 149-162 
 Auden, W. H., 24, 202 
 
 Bad Seed, The, 6-7, 29-31, 38-51; film, 
 49-50 
 
 Baldwin, James, 10-11, 149-162, 164, 
 169,171-172, 181-182, 187-188, 
 199,213 
 
 Baniewski, Gertrude, 165-166, 169- 
 188 
 
 Baniewski, John, 170, 173 
 Baniewski, Paula, 170 
 Baraka, Amiri. Seejones, LeRoi 
 Basement , The, 10-11, r 64-188 
 Battered Women’s Syndrome, 146, 
 
 1 79 
 
 Baudrillard, Jean, 25 
 Beausoleil, Robert, 207 
 Beck, Martha Jule, 7-8, 79-140, 199- 
 200; “abnormality” of, 82-85, 88-89, 
 95-96; appearance of, 88, 102-103, 
 
 22 ini2; execution of, ro2-i03;Fay 
 murder, responsibility for, 82, 215- 
 220; and maternal feeling, 95, 100; 
 notoriety, 80-81, 105; portrayals of, 
 108-141; and prison, 98-102, 118- 
 120; suicide attempts, 90, 95 
 
 Bell, Camille, 155 
 Bell, Yusef, 155 
 
 Bennett, James Gordon, 20, 23 
 Bentley, Derek, 122 
 
 Biological determinism, 42, 51, 68, 166, 
 169-170, 176 
 Black, Joel, 5, 24-28 
 Bok, Curtis, 6-7, 10-1 r, 69-78, 165- 
 167, 204 
 Brady, Ian, 177 
 Breen Committee, 49 
 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 21, 213 
 Brooks, Richard, 211 
 Brown, Lee, 155 
 Brown, Wenzell, 109-117 
 Buck, Paul, 128-130 
 Bushnell, Ben, 201, 266^9 
 
 Capital Punishment. See Death penalty 
 Capote, Truman, 205-208, 211,213 
 Censorship, 26 
 
 Chapman, David, 26-27, 2 2 5n42 
 Childhood, 30, 50 
 Civil Rights, 126-127 
 Class, 171, 174-176, 185-187, 213 
 Classification. See Topology 
 Community, 161-162, 171-172 
 Confession: narrative function of, 199- 
 201 
 
 Creighton, Mary, 99 
 Crime: commonsensical reactions to, 
 85-87; literature and, 16-26, 81, 85- 
 87, 91 (tee also Detective fiction); 
 movies and, 86-87, 130-131, 133 (see 
 also Film noir); political change and, 
 
Crime (cont.) 
 
 126-127,145-149; race an d>146- 
 149; television and, 17-18, 145- 
 146 
 
 Criminology: feminist, 124-155, 164, 
 
 2 57n4i; radical, 155-156 
 
 Dahmer,Jeffrey, 192-193, 203-204, 
 
 211-212 
 
 Dahmer, Lionel, 192-193, 203-204, 
 
 211-213 
 
 Darrow, Clarence, 108 
 Davis, David Brion, 5, 19-23, 2242123 
 Death: and femininity, 21-23. See also 
 Mortality 
 
 Death penalty: 7, 69-72, 133,189, 191- 
 192,195-196, 238n78; in United 
 Kingdom, 122, 251052; as racially 
 discriminatory, 148-149, 162 . See also 
 Execution 
 
 Degeneration, 17, 29-30, 38, 39-43, 45, 
 47, 226m 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 25 
 Detective fiction, 43,45, 86-87, 9L 
 no, 122-123; hardboiled, 124-126. 
 See also Crime 
 Devine, Henry, 79-80 
 Diminished responsibility, 66-67 
 Discrimination and affirmative action, 
 
 148- 149, 2 55 ni 4 
 
 Downing, Delphine, 81-82, 84, 92, 
 
 105 
 
 Downing, Rainelle, 81-82, 84, 105 
 Dreiser, Theodore, 31-32 
 
 Ellis, Bill, 5, 27-28 
 Ellis, Ruth, 122 
 Eschatology, 47-48 
 Espionage in literature, 121. See also 
 Genre 
 
 Essentialism, 30-31,42-43,47-50. See 
 also Biological determinism 
 Eugenics, 17 
 
 Evidence of Things Not Seen, The, 10-n, 
 
 149- 162, 164, 181-182, 199 
 Evil, 30-31, 39-40, 42-43,47-51 
 Execution, 18-19,47,77, 189, 197, 
 
 210-211; symbolic power of, 195- 
 196; televising, debate regarding, 
 
 191 -199. See also Death penalty 
 Executioner's Song, The, 201-202, 205- 
 208 
 
 Existentialism, 47-49 
 
 Fatherhood, 40-41, 50; paternal sym¬ 
 bolism and, 73-77 
 Fay, Janet, 79,82,92, 115-117, 134, 
 
 137,215-220 
 
 Femininity: death and, 21-23; race an d, 
 159-160; and sexual shame, 169-171, 
 174-176; Woman as “chosen” victim, 
 62,169-188. See also Gender; Women 
 murderers 
 
 Feminist criminology. See Criminology 
 Fernandez, Raymond, 7-8, 79-140, 
 199-200; execution of, 102; Fay 
 murder, 215-220; masculinity of, 94, 
 96, 99-100, 114-115; notoriety of, 
 80-81,105; portrayals of, 108-141; 
 and prison, 98-102, 119-120; 
 voodoo, interest in, 110, 248^ 
 
 Film noir, 87, 125-126 
 Folie a deux, 9, 85, 104, 107-110, 132, 
 140; definition, 109 
 Folklore, 8. See also Urban folklore 
 Forensic psychology, 5-7, 16, 53-55, 
 68-69, 7 8 ’ I< ^7 
 
 Formalism. See Legal formalism 
 Foucault, Michel, 18-19, 23-24, 30, 
 222n6 
 
 Franks, Bobby, 108 
 Free will, 39, 75 
 
 Gedeon, Ethel, 62 
 Gedeon, Veronica, 56, 60-62 
 Gender, 10-11, 31, 38, 50,66-68, 129, 
 163-188, 213; death and, 21-23; race 
 and,157-162,169,171-172 
 Genre, 8-9,43-44, 85,91,100,122- 
 123,133. See also Crime; Detective fic¬ 
 tion; Espionage in literature; Romance 
 Gilmore, Gary, 201-202, 206, 266039, 
 2671141 
 
 Goetz, Bernhard, 2 39n84 
 
 280 Index 
 
Gray, Judd, 47, 2461173 
 Gunness, Belle, 46, 2301153, 231064 
 
 Hacking, Ian, 26 
 “Handcarved Coffins,” 207 
 “Hanging,” 211, 213 
 Harris, Robert Alton, 191, 198 
 Hearts Killers. See Beck, Martha; Fer¬ 
 nandez, Ray 
 
 Herostratus complex, 52, 57-60, 65 
 Hickock, Richard, 206-207, 211, 2I 3 
 Hinckley,John, 26-27, 225042 
 Hindley, Myra, 177 
 Hobbs, Rickie, 170, 173 
 Hoffman, Richard, 84, 210 
 Homicide in American Fiction, 5, 19-23 
 Homosexuality, 34-35, 160,192 
 Honeymoon Killers, The. See Beck, 
 Martha; Fernandez, Raymond 
 Honeymoon Killers, The, 121; film, 9-10, 
 117, 126, 128-141 
 Hubbard, Coy, 170, 173 
 Hyde, H. Montgomery, 118 
 
 Identity, 160, 171-172 
 Imbrie, Ann E., 168-169 
 In Cold Blood, 205-208, 211; film, 211 
 Infanticide, 163 
 
 Insanity, 52-69, 77, 82-85, 108-109, 
 242013. See also Madness: in literature 
 Irwin, Robert, 55-65, 69 
 
 Jensen, Max, 201, 266039 
 Jewett, Helen, 20-23 
 Jones, Clifford, 152 
 Jones, LeRoi, 160 
 
 Journalism, 201. See also Print media 
 Julian, Roy, 174 
 Justifiable homicide, 71 
 
 Knock on Any Door, 6-7, 29-39, 69 
 KQEDvs. Daniel B. Vasquez, 191-199 
 
 Law and lawyers, 73-78 
 
 Lee, Harper, 205, 267n47 
 
 Legal Formalism, 74, 148-149, 162, 
 
 200 
 
 Legend. See Urban folklore 
 Leibowitz, Samuel, 55 
 Lennon, John, 26-27 
 Leopold, Nathan, 5, 108 
 Le Roy, Mervyn, 49-50 
 Lesser, Wendy, 5, 19,189-199, 201- 
 202 
 
 Lichtenstein, Perry, 218 
 Life Plus 99 Years, 5 
 Likens, Jenny, 165, 170, 172 
 Likens, Lester, 175 
 
 Likens, Sylvia, 165,167,170, 172-188 
 Little Ceasar, 49 
 Loeb, Richard, 108 
 Luzon, Dr., 89 
 
 Madness: in literature, 2 2 
 Malcolm, Janet, 201, 204 
 Mailer, Norman, 201-202, 205-208 
 Male violence, 154-155, 169-170,176- 
 177 
 
 March, William, 6-7,10-11,29-31, 
 38-51 
 
 Masculinity, 21-23, 32-38, 157-162 
 Medea, 66-68, 176 
 Media. See Journalism; Print media; 
 Television 
 
 Millett, Kate, 10-n, 164-188, 213 
 Mortality, 197-198, 202-203, 211-212 
 Motherhood, 40-43,66-68, 95,100; 
 maternal symbolism and, 73, 76-77. 
 See also Femininity 
 
 Motley, Willard, 6-7, 10-n, 29-39, 69 
 Murder, statistics, 4, 71, 146-147, 
 
 2 54 n 5 
 
 Mythology, Classical, 52, 78 
 McCarthy, Cormac, 203 
 McCleskey vs Georgia, 148-149,162. See 
 also Death penalty 
 
 Narrative: conventions in true crime, 8- 
 9; myth and, 78 
 Native Son, 31-33, 69 
 Naturalism, 6, 29, 31, 37 
 Newgate Chronicle. See Ordinary of New¬ 
 gate Account 
 Nilsen, Dennis, 213 
 
 Index 281 
 
Oedipus, 58 
 
 Ordinary Of Newgate Account, 16-17 
 Orwell, George, 211,213 
 
 Patriarchy, 10, 169-188 
 People vs Fernandez, 87-106 
 Photograph: symbolic status of, 182- 
 184, 2621154, 2651120 
 Pictures at an Execution, 189-199 
 Pornography, 25-26 
 Print media, 56-57, 64-65, 86-87 
 Psychiatry, 74. See also Forensic psychia¬ 
 try 7 ; Psychoanalysis 
 Psychoanalysis, 47-48, 54-55 
 Pulp genres, 81, 85-87. See also Genre 
 
 Race, io-ii, 146-162, 169, 171-172, 
 175,187-188, 209, 213 
 Radical Criminology. See Criminology 
 Randle, Clarence, 200 
 Reagan, Ronald, 26, 156 
 Representation, 15-19, 23-28, 194-195 
 Revenge, 52, 70, 2 39n86 
 Reynolds, Quentin, 56 
 Riviere, Pierre, 23-24, 59-60 
 Robinson, Edward, 89 
 Robinson, Richard, 20, 23 
 Romance, 8, 81, 85-106, 118-120, 128- 
 141; narrative requirements of, 90- 
 91. See also Genre 
 Rosenberg, Ethel, 120-121 
 Rosenberg, Julius, 120-121 
 Rowan, David, 118-120 
 
 Sacrifice, 52, 57-62 
 Sadomasochism, 178-179 
 Sanders, Bruce, 121-126 
 Satanic cults, 5,27-28, 226048 
 Satanism. See Satanic cults 
 Schiller, Larry 7 , 205 
 Schnacke, Robert, 191 
 Seabrook, Martha. See Beck, Martha 
 Jule 
 
 Second-wave feminism. See Women’s 
 Movement 
 
 Self-defense, 71. See also Justifiable 
 homicide 
 
 Sentimental literature, 21-23, 125-126 
 Serial killers, 9, 25-26, 131, 145-146, 
 22 4 n 34 ~ 35 »239n88 
 
 Sexual difference, 186-187. Fee also Bio¬ 
 logical determinism 
 Sexuality, 30, 31-38, 50, 62-64; race 
 and, 160, 228ni6. See also Homosex¬ 
 uality 
 
 Shoemaker, Diane, 174 
 Show of Violence, 6-7, 52-70 
 Smith, Perry 7 , 206-207, 211, 213 
 Snavely, Lee, 168 
 
 Snyder, Ruth Brown, 46-47, 230053, 
 2461173 
 
 Social injury, 148-149, 152 
 
 Star Wormwood, 6-7, 69-78, 165-167 
 
 Television, 191-199 
 Theology 7 , 47-49 
 Thompson, Jane, 84-85 
 Toohey, James, 200 
 Topology, 53-55, 78, 166-167, 206- 
 208. See also Forensic psychology 
 Transference, 55, 69 
 Trials: role of spectators in, 97-98 
 True crime, 7-9, 16-17, 29, 39-40,43- 
 47, 51, 54, 64, 81-141, 205, 210, 
 
 2 21 n 13; antigeneric forms of, 152- 
 I 53 >187-188,192-193, 198-199, 
 203-204; English fascination w 7 ith, 
 108, 117-126 
 
 United States Supreme Court: anti- 
 discrimination and affirmative action 
 legislation, 147-149, 255014; death 
 penalty legislation and, 148-149, 162; 
 Warren Court, 127 
 Urban folklore, 5, 18, 27-28, 226045 
 
 Victim, 59-62, 164-188; murderer as, 
 164,177, 205-206 
 
 Violence: the media and, 25-26. See also 
 Crime: television and; Male violence 
 
 War, 38-39 
 
 War of the Worlds, broadcast of, 194-195 
 Welles, Orson, 194-195 
 
 282 Index 
 
Wertham, Fredric, 6-8, 10-11,52-70, 
 166-167, 20 4> 2371162 
 Williams, Wayne, 10,149-150,154,187 
 Women murderers, 66-68, 145-146, 
 163-164, 176-177,26on5 
 
 Women’s Movement, 126-127, 169, 
 171 
 
 Wright, Richard, 31-33, 69 
 Young, Myrtle, 84 
 
 Index 283 
 
Sara L. Knox is Lecturer in 
 Gender and Cultural Studies at the 
 University of Western Sydney. 
 
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 Knox, Sara L. 
 
 Murder: a tale of modern American life / Sara Louise 
 
 Knox. 
 
 p. cm. 
 
 Includes bibliographical references and index. 
 isbn 0-8223-2053-3 (cloth : alk. paper). — 
 isbn 0-8223-2066-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) 
 
 1. Murder literature. 2. Murder in literature. 
 
 3. Murder in mass media. I. Tide. 
 
 HV6515.K64 1998 
 
 364.15'2 3'0973 — dc21 97-23086