Every city's crime is unique. It has a personality of its own shaped over time by both nature and nurture, by the geography and the politics. We read about and watch shows on New York City, Chicago, LA, Miami, but my hometown isn't like those places.
I've lived in Austin, Texas my whole life, and it's almost a cliche now to opine on how much it's changed. But some things about this city are just as they were, trapped in amber, unable to change, stuck. They couldn't move forward in this fast-moving city, and so they got left behind. People, neighborhoods, mindsets--this progressive city is not only innovative in its technology, but in its many ways to sweep things under the rug. No time to stop and fix, keep pushing, growing, advancing.
In the late 1880s, Austin found itself in the throes of serial killings. The one responsible was never found. But he had multiple horrific murders under his belt before the town began to panic. How did he manage that? How did he get away with it for so long? The answer is tragically simple: color of his early victims' skin. It wasn't until a white woman was murdered that the town's most powerful flew into a fearful fervor, and I'd bet you can guess who they began scapegoating first.
And even then, back in the 1880s, Austin was already billing itself nationally as a progressive city.
When the highway systems went in in the early '60s, Interstate Highway 35 formalized the dividing line between White Austin and Black Austin, neighborhoods that had been established during the transparent racism of the eighteen hundreds and reinforced through various laws and lesser roadways in the time since. The result was that "west of 35" and "east of 35" were spoken in different tones of voice, even up through the 1980s, when I was born.
Where I was born was east of 35, the forgotten side of the interstate. We sold that house in 1994 for $55,000, and when I look up the value online now, it's listed at $560,000.
Some things have changed in Austin, sure, but not enough. The housing prices have increased tenfold, but are the folks who lived there in 1994 all making ten times the income? Do they have ten times the opportunity? Or has progress left them behind, pushed them out to farther and farther reaches of the city?
Gentrification is nothing new. Inequality is nothing new. But the evolution of it—and the groups affected—vary from place to place, and it's in that specific history where we find the bitter aftertaste that is each city's crime.
West of 35, the soil is easy enough to plant in. There's caliche rock about 6 inches down, though. You get used to accounting for it, that healthful soil just above the hard, impenetrable shelf. With access the right tools, you can grow quite the garden. Meanwhile, the soil east of 35 is a dense clay, fertile for its own kind of plants. The trick is to learn what can and can't thrive on each side.
I've lived north, south, east, and west in this city, and I've seen how things grow here. I know the tensions. We're a future-focused city in a traditional state. We're a population of wonderfully naive idealists with a drug trafficking highway flaying us down the middle. We're crusaders for green energy who are backed by oil money.
And that leaves a certain impression. Austin's not like anywhere else, and neither is its crime. My mysteries are love letters as much as they are grievances. I write about this city that shaped me, that filled me up with contradictions, that showed me the flaws of both sides, that taught me "You still aren't over it yet?" isn't part of a proper apology for wrongdoing.
There's a lifetime of this tension inside me, and now I get to share it through the Dana Capone series.
Does Dissociative Identity Disorder exist?
I just finished watching Monsters Inside: the 24 Faces of Billy Milligan on Netflix this week. It set my brain on fire about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (previously called Multiple Personality Disorder).
For there to be a disorder so distinctive that a large portion of psychologists are skeptical exists is fascinating.
My mother had a friend who was diagnosed with DID. Maybe you or someone you know has been diagnosed as well. It's hard to deny the reality of it when you witness the switch of personalities first hand.
My mother's friend was a victim of horrible cruelty when she was a very young child, and the result of the trauma was, apparently, the split. Certain events would trigger her, and then - boom. Enter new personality.
All of the personalities we ever saw were harmless. One was a fifteen-year-old boy, and when he would come around, her children would need to find alternate rides to places because she was no longer old enough to drive.
So, from that experience, I'm strongly inclined to believe it exists. If it doesn't exist, what the hell was all that?
And then there's this strange bit: instances of DID cropped up in large numbers in the seventies, eighties, and even into the nineties, and then they just sort of disappeared.
That fact makes it seem more like a social construct. An illness of suggestion. A clinical fad, even.
But that doesn't square with my mother's friend. The timing does, but I wasn't looking at a woman participating in a fad. I was looking at a broken woman who tried her best not to suffer in that way.
In the documentary Crazy, Not Insane, we chip away at this even further, mostly with regard to killers who are diagnosed with MPD (now DID). The theory presented is that essentially every serial killer suffers from DID. That element of "he seemed so normal" or "he could never do that" that we always hear could be explained away like that, at least. Maybe his core personality was normal or gentle.
Or maybe the common element of these serial killers is psychopathy, not dissociation. Psychopaths are happy to lie, and the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) isn't hard to get ahold of. Sure, blame your acts on an evil alter personality. That's a sure-fire way to offload your responsibility. Yes, it's still a part of you that did it, but it's not your fault, right? You can't help your (faked) disorder.
This seems like the most sensical explanation to me when it comes to people who kill for sport. And if DID does exist, faking as if you have it to gain sympathy and avoid consequences is even worse.
So, how do we ever come to a conclusion about all of this?
No, really, I would love to know. If you have an idea, please pass it along. I'll just be chewing on it in the meantime.
Police Work is Not Like the Movies
Police work in real life isn't like in the movies.
But if it were, those movies wouldn't make much at the box office.
My husband works in law enforcement, no matter how much I try to convince him to find a job with better hours where he won't be made the scapegoat and poster child for all of society's ills. But he loves it too much, and I'm always forced to concede that with his deep emotional intelligence and compassion for humanity, he's exactly the kind of person everyone deserves to have arrive on scene during the worst moment of their life.
For the most part, though, police work is boring. And incongruous. And open-ended. None of those are great for a movie. Hitting tab to go from form field to form field on a report isn't sexy. Bringing the same person in on criminal mischief charges for the 300th time isn't glamorous. And delivering a death notification to a ten-year-old boy about his mother isn't a potent plot point, it's a complete emotional shitshow for everyone involved and begs for therapy afterward.
From what I can tell, being a cop is a game of hurry-up-and-wait. It's an odd mix of boring and routine and close encounters with unforgettable sadness and evil. Law enforcement officers encounter more trauma each week on the job than most of us do in our entire lifetime. People can't help but be shaped by that.
These are some of the concerns floating around in my little skull as I write the Dana Capone series. I want to do the job of law enforcement justice because the people doing it deserve that. But I also don't want to bore the everliving fuck out of my readers.
What you can rely on when you read the series, though, is that there's some truth to it. When Detective Capone bucks standard procedure, everyone knows it. The detectives and sergeants and patrol officers will remain complex, and the issues among the ranks won't be watered down. Shit will get real. My husband will be holding me to that.
But I'll show you the exciting parts of it. We'll skip the paperwork... unless there's a clue in the paperwork. Because as unsexy as that is, sometimes that's where the biggest moments of revelation happen—alone at the substation at 3am, filling out forms. You'll get to see all sides of policing in this series, because there are so many sides to show, and no, not all of them are pretty to look at. But tell me a profession where all sides of it are easy on the eyes. Every industry is complex like that, but not every career allows you to save lives, to be a source of comfort for strangers in their dark moments, and to get evil off the streets.
That's what draws me to it, and I suspect that's what draws you to it, as well. Complexity is riveting, especially in the battle of good and evil.
If you want to see what it’s like against the backdrop of Austin, Texas, check out my Dana Capone series. Start with the free prequel, Legacy Killers, or jump straight into book 1, Killer Delivery.
When They All Disappear
Family annihilations have been on the rise over the last fifteen years. It’s not a topic that gets much attention, which is surprising, considering how shocking and sensational such a thing is. And I have to wonder, is that because the public (or rather the vast majority of the people who make it up) expect or even accept the concept?
The term is self-explanatory. Someone annihilates their entire family. We’re not talking about a mob hit or an act of domestic terrorism from someone outside the family unit. We’re talking about wholesale destruction and obliteration from within. Nearly without fail, the person who perpetuates this crime is the father/stepfather/boyfriend. When it’s not the father, then it’s probably the son.
The reason we know the name Lizzie Borden is that it’s never the daughter and almost never the mother, hence making that a notable case. (There are also some great arguments against that slaughter having been at the hands of Lizzie, if you want to read up.)
Not everything is a matter of sex, of men v. women, but one gender definitely has a monopoly on this particular variety of atrocity. But why?
The woman who drowns her kids is a trope that Western media loves. Really, any patriarchal society has reason to prop it up, because not only can it be weaponized to falsely parallel women who don’t want children with full-on murderers and make child-free women look like they might have moral deficiency bordering on criminality, but it serves as a perfect deflection for those who want to point out and, god forbid, talk about the alarming trend of men murdering their families. “But women do it too!”
Ah yes, we love a good false equivalency.
But putting those few, often dubiously sourced, and bad-faith examples of female family annihilators aside, we need to talk about what’s happening here.
Because at the heart of it, we find the quintessential patriarchal contradiction.
Family annihilations almost always end with the perpetrator killing himself, but in those few times when that’s not the case and investigators and psychologists can speak with him about why he did it, an alarming trend of justification begins to emerge: he believes he was shielding his victims from something worse.
What something could be worse than those last moments of terror his family felt when he assassinated them in the living room or shot them one by one in their beds while the last in line might have known he was coming but been unable to escape? What something could be worse than having the man who swore to protect you being the one who took your life? What something could be worse than those final seconds and the bitter realization of betrayal and confusion followed by a moment of pain then a future erased?
We actually know the answer to that, at least according to the interviews. Quite often, the thing the man was “shielding” his family from was his own sense of shame. That could be financial shame—he’s lost all his money or a con he was running got found out—or social shame—maybe an infidelity was about to be exposed. It could be anything that might make him feel bad. And rather than dealing with those feelings, he fed himself a lie until he bought it that his shame would also be felt by his family, and they would rather die than feel that vicarious shame. He wasn’t protecting them at all; he was always protecting his own ego. No shocker there for the emotionally literate.
Another common motive? His partner was planning to leave and take the children with her. In this case, he’s somehow justified the logic of “if I can’t have them then no one can” as validation for mass murder. What idea or system of ideas could possibly lead someone to believe there’s anything heroic about any of those justifications?
Because these men want to think of themselves as the hero. We all do, to some extent. Or at least, they probably don’t want to believe they’re the villain. Perhaps it’s the thin veil of pretense being pulled back after the murders that leads to this situation ending so often in suicide, but unless the perpetrators leave a note, we’ll never know.
Kate Manne talks about this concept in brutal and frank detail in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, but I really want to hone in on it briefly, because it’s just so important for everyone to see through. Until we reach a tipping point of people who understand the perverse logic that operates at all levels of our society, women and children will continue to be murdered by men in their family.
“But women murder people in their family too!”
If that’s where your brain goes every time I mention men murdering their family, I want you to pause and ask why. Why does a focus on male homicide make you want to deflect? Who trained you to protect that reputation at the cost of ignoring the statistics?
In 2020, out of 11,635 murders in the United States, 8,977 were committed by men, 1,320 were committed by women, and 1,338 were committed by an unknown subject. If we assume that the unknown subjects breaks down proportionally to the known subjects (it’s sound statistical analysis, don’t worry), then that would mean that men murdered 10,143 people and women murdered 1,447 people. To sum up, 87% of all homicides in 2020 were committed by men. Can you imagine if that was switched? Can you imagine if, in our society, 87% of murders were committed by women?
We’re having our rights stripped enough these days as it is. I can’t imagine we would be allowed to even leave the house if those were the crime statistics.
But we accept it in men. Maybe not you individually—and I certainly don’t—but as a society, we absolutely do. If we didn’t, we would be having more conversations about that and fewer about women’s bodies, bizarre hypotheticals about nonexistent voter fraud, and why guns are a man’s god-given right to own even as he uses them to murder his family.
So, please, no one try to tell me we don’t accept it, because we very much do, and that’s because all of us are filled with the silent scripts that come into play in the days leading up to a family annihilation. Never has it been cleared that men in this country feel entitled to women’s bodies. And children’s, too (looking at you Catholic Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, USA Gymnastics, US border detention centers, and Boy Scouts of America). If it hadn’t been for a few people sounding the alarm and not letting up about the abuse, the systems in place would have kept allowing it to happen.
Because they were built for that.
Let that sink in.
The status quo is and has been for as long as Western Civilization has been around, to let abuse happen to women and children. So long as the perpetrators are men, you let it slide. They probably knew best, right?
I live in my little feminist bubble, no doubt. Can you blame me? I don’t especially want to be around people who don’t believe I’m an equal to men and entitled to the same freedom of choice as someone with male sex organs. Why would I?
But the result is that it’s always shocking to me when I hear someone defending the patriarchy. I forget those people exist. “Men need to be in charge because we are the protectors.”
When? When exactly are men the protectors, and more importantly, from whom?
Men protect this country abroad. Okay, but women weren’t allowed to serve in combat until recently. Maybe that’s why.
A man protects his family. From who? I know plenty of single mothers who manage to keep their children safe. And how many times have fathers blamed their daughters after finding out they were raped? Why would girls and boys so often not want their fathers to know about their victimization?
And what about family annihilations?
Marriage to a cop has made it crystal clear who most families need protection from, and it’s not an outside force. It’s not the boogyman, it’s not the government, and it’s not Satan. It’s the abusive boyfriend, the abusive father, the man who feels entitled to the bodies of those he claims to protect. So entitled, that the mere prospect of having to face them in a state of shame justifies murder in his mind.
These ideas are so sick and so twisted, and yet they’re everywhere and in everything—corporate culture, every level of government, public spaces, school, church—literally anywhere other people can be found.
We want to slice off the visibly rotten part of society that is family annihilation and say, “That’s separate from everything else, it’s an anomaly,” but the rot runs through everything and is only most sharply manifested in that spectacle.
So maybe that’s why we don’t talk about it. Just like we don’t talk about how almost every shocking mass shooting that’s hit the media in the last twenty years has started with the murder or extreme physical abuse of a female relative or partner. We’re worried how much more we’d have to talk about if we picked up that thread of the conversation and pulled. We’d have to examine our complicity in allowing male violence and entitlement to others to be the default in every system. So instead, when someone like me brings up something like the epidemic of male violence, inevitably the chorus chimes in with their tired old tune to spare possible hurt feelings:
“Not all men.”
No shit, Sherlock. Not all men, but still too fucking many.
If you want a truly haunting peek into the real life consequences of this sick mindset, watch American Murder on Netflix. It’s one of the most disturbing true crime documentaries I’ve ever seen.
Decomposition is a Matter of Perspective
I thought getting away might help my focus, and that’s how I ended up alone in a hotel room on the other side of the city. I worked from the overly soft bed as much as I could, all four flimsy feather pillows stuffed behind my back as I leaned over my laptop.
These revisions on the next Dana Capone book have been giving me hell. Or maybe it’s not the revisions. Maybe it’s the state of the world. I can’t even listen to NPR anymore without rolling my eyes. They bite onto a topic and lock their jaws like a pit bull until everyone with genuine interest in helping is so goddamn sick of hearing about it, that they start rolling their eyes when it’s mentioned. ‘Nother Problem Radio. No news station is any better at this point, and most are worse.
Maybe that was what I trying to escape with my hotel stay, and maybe that’s why it was a train wreck. I couldn’t focus there any more than I could at home. I got a few hours of revisions done right off the bat, then it went downhill.
But on my second day, after a strategic OD on caffeine, I hit my rhythm at around midnight. I was in the zone. And when you’re a crime writer, the zone often includes some downright off-putting web searches.
That the FBI has not raided my home yet is either proof that they’re asleep on the job, or that they’ve already confirmed I’m a writer and have removed my name from the no-fly list. But at around one in the morning in that hotel room, as I found myself researching the smell of assorted turpentines to find if they could cover up the stench of decomposing remains, I felt like I might have crossed a line. If this doesn’t lead to my arrest, maybe nothing will.
In my research on the topic, alone in that quiet, I found myself looking at quite a few human bodies in various states of rot. Seeing that horror is the kind of mental disruption we (people in “civilized” society) don’t normally get. We go to such great lengths to never be exposed to images like that, which shine a light on the undignified reality of death. What might it do to our egos? To our sandcastles of grandiosity and purpose?
One sequence of images in particular caught my attention, and the sight was as appalling as it was pathetic. A human man, whose life was likely a Gordian knot of asinine concerns and self-importance (as everyone’s is), lying there for the internet’s gawking pleasure, frame after frame as time had its way with him. The eyes were censored to obscure his identity, which doesn’t require much scrutiny to appear a ludicrous measure. The protocol wasn’t to protect the deceased. He couldn’t care. Instead, it was obviously to reassure the living that our vanity will be preserved once Elvis has left the building.
Because I have zero control over my imagination, I found myself projecting other faces onto that rotting corpse. I imagined it was my face whose lips were pealed back like two dried apricots as a froth of maggots escaped my mouth, nose, and eyes. That will be me one day.
Ew. No it fucking will not. I made a mental note to specify in my will that I prefer to be cremated.
A parade of my loved ones marched into frame next. In the lead was my husband, the person I care about most in this world, whose absence from me in that hotel room was likely part of the reason I couldn’t focus. Flies would happily make a meal of him if given the chance.
Of course, they won’t get it. He’ll be cremated, too.
Maybe the process of rot, as irreverent as it is to our fragile egos, is the greatest gift we can give to this earth. It nourishes flies and worms. It enriches the soil. It keeps one more person from driving an SUV.
I often think about what I want to return as if reincarnation is the real deal. There’s nowhere I feel more peaceful than in the soft quiet of the woods, so being a tree might be nice. Not just any tree, obviously. It’s not a great century to be a tree, what with the logging and raging forest fires. I want to come back as a tree in an ancient forest, maybe somewhere in central Europe, or wherever isn’t a tinderbox at the time of my return. I want to grow into a giant over thousands of years, have little forest creatures call me home, commune via the wood wide web with the other trees I’ve come to know and trust over the millennia. When the wind blows and the rain pours, I want to know I have others to lean on and that others will lean on me, that we’ll all hold each other up.
But now? I’m not so sure. Bugs inside me? No, no, that’s not ideal. That’s what decomposition is, and I’m simply not a fan. I want to return to nature, but not in an icky way. Let me take my precious ego with me!
I finally shut down my computer at around 2:30 that morning, and fell asleep at 4. Various sleep aids might have been involved.
At 5:30am, through the oppressive fog of melatonin et al, it occurred to me that a woman was screaming. You might think that’s fairly clear cut and I should have jumped to attention, but unfortunately I have a history of hypnopompic hallucinations, both auditory and visual.
It’s not uncommon for me to awaken in the dead of night to the sound of someone speaking my name straight into my ear only to find that I’m entirely alone. I once spent an entire night waking up at intervals to see a woman floating in the corner of my room, screaming in agony and ordering an unknown force to get me, all while my body was paralyzed and unable to do a thing about it.
But this time, the screaming continued even after I was mostly awake. There was no ambiguity about it then. A woman was shouting incoherently in the courtyard of the hotel, right outside my room. I promptly called the cops and crawled back into bed, but sleep didn’t return after that.
I left the next morning with a migraine and vomited on the side of the highway. A fitting end to my hotel debacle. But the haunting images of the rotting man stayed with me. And you know what? In the days since, they’ve unlocked doors to living.
We will all die. It’s a concept that’s not foreign to anyone but psychologically kept at arm’s length. We fall prey to the gamified razzle-dazzle of modern society—the news cycle, skyrocketing costs of living, signals that our worth is tied up in our earning potential for richer men, the easy ways to numb our existential dread rather than confronting it.
It’s all made up. You know that, don’t you? We all do in those dark moments between fixes. We’re lumps of silly organic material with no inherent purpose or meaning. Creating one for ourselves is nice, but it’s not actually necessary to the organic world around us. We only remain warm bodies for a startlingly short amount of time. Even our hard-earned legacies will fade quickly once we’re ashes or dirt.
If you stood up and danced right where you are as you read this, it wouldn’t matter one lick. Oh, you’re waiting in line at the grocery store? Still doesn’t matter. You’re at a funeral? Especially doesn’t matter. Not in the scheme of things.
A few days after the hotel stay, I had dinner with someone who I have a long history with. Interactions with this person often leave me with migraines the next day, not to mention a lot of psychological unpacking to do. But as I sat there, listening to some of the same nonsense that usually makes my head hurt, I imagined this person as a rotting corpse. It made me sad. I don’t want them to be a rotting corpse.
A switch flipped, and I felt suddenly fortified. The conversation was easy. I felt freer to speak my mind, to contradict, but most importantly, to let things go. To not comment. To not let the words and emotional manipulations bother me. It all rolled right off. My usual need to correct the factual inaccuracies or point out the bigotry was gone. Poof! Let them be wrong. Magic. That’s all it could be. Pre-corpse magic.
I don’t mention any of this to encourage folks to be nihilistic assholes, only to point out that so much of what we believe we must do is completely pointless.
Incineration or maggots: which do you choose?
Oh, you chose fish? Clever girl.
The point is you’re free. You’re free and time is running out, and that need to maintain appearances with friends and family is pointless. That need to be right and have others know is pointless. We’re all heading toward an undignified finale, so maybe, if your life feels too heavy for you, stop attaching so much weight to things.
Let pride and envy and shame go. Have sex with someone warm (and consenting). Give that dream of yours a shot. Fail in it. Have sex with someone warm (and consenting) again. Eat chocolate with your eyes closed and moan as loudly as you want to. None of that is sin, if you even give two shits about all that. And all of it is yours for a limited time only!
I remembered all this from a man I don’t know whose eyes were censored with a silly black bar. But that doesn’t make any of it untrue.
Enjoy your body before the worms do. Why not?
If I Go Missing...
Are you prepared to be abducted?
I am. I don’t want to be, obviously, but if it happens, I’m about as well-positioned for it as possible. I have an “If I Go Missing” sheet for my husband with all my relevant passwords on it. He can log in and track my phone. Also, he’s a cop, so that’s a huge advantage. Police spouse goes missing, and you have an entire department dropping what they’re doing to look. Not everyone has that, which is extremely unfortunate.
For them. Not for me. I’ll be fine, like I said.
I was watching some true crime the other night, as I’m wont to do, and it occurred to me that the disaster wouldn’t be if I went missing and turned up dead. It would be if my husband died under mysterious circumstances.
Y’all, I would be so screwed.
As a crime writer, my browser history alone is enough to convince any jury that I’m guilty. God forbid he die by one of the methods I’ve googled. There’s no scenario that follows in which I would not be absolutely fucked.
And then there’s the part of every documentary where they interview people who knew the victim and the suspected killer. This, too, would spell catastrophe for me. My husband, Jack, is the kind of person everybody loves. I visit his extended family, and it’s clear he was always their favorite. “He’s such a sweet boy…” Wistful. Always said wistfully.
I’ve gone on a patrol ride-out with him, and even the criminals warm to him before long, and not just prior to their arrest, but after as well. He’s had people thank him for what he does while he’s carting them off to jail. They feel privileged to have gotten him as their arresting officer.
It’s bullshit, really. I don’t know how he pulls it off. Not even the most adept film crew would be able to find someone to spill the tea on him because his reputation is spotless. He’s even on good terms with all his exes. It’s freakish.
Meanwhile, you got me. Boy, oh boy, would people come crawling out of the woodwork to talk shit. I don’t mean to be this way, but there’s just something about me that attracts it. I’ve tried at various points in my life to be “nice” and all it’s amounted to was a bunch of people taking advantage of me, not recognizing my generosity or effort, and then talking shit about me anyway. So, I stopped trying. I’m still generous. I still act with integrity. I’m still honest. But I’m not nice in the way most people mean it when they talk about women. I’m not a doormat. That works well for me now, because it means I have boundaries, a life that suits me well, and no dead-weight relationships. But it won’t look so good if my sweet husband goes missing…
”Oh, Claire? Yeah, she really thought she was all that in high school. Got straight A’s and acted like she was too good for everyone. But on the weekends, she would party—not many people know this. She would chug vodka straight from the bottle.”
I couldn’t deny any of that, either. It’s true. It all happened. But it wasn’t a pattern of behavior. I chugged vodka from a bottle once. A lot of it. I had no idea how strong it was. Live and learn. Haven’t enjoyed vodka since.
But then add this salt to the wound:
“She was such a rule follower, so we were all shocked when she was caught drinking at school with a few other kids.”
Yes, that happened, too. But again, it wasn’t a pattern of behavior. It was just the chaos of being 17, having been taught no emotional coping mechanisms, and being a perfectionist. I’ve since addressed all those issues.
“She’s the kind of person who pushes herself until she snaps.”
Oh no. Now I’m looking super guilty, huh? All it’d take would be for one person to come along and say, “She always had a jealous streak, and I know she hated all the nights Jack was away at work,” and then suddenly we have a whole story about motive coming together.
Yet again, yes, those things are true about me. I can get a bit jealous. It’s just an instinct. But after a decade with my husband, he’s earned my trust and it’s not an issue. Do I hate his work schedule? Yes, but only because I want to spend more time with him. These are tensions within me, and we all exist with variations of these. They don’t have to be a motive for murder.
And then the show would drop the clincher: an interview with my parents. Hey! They’ll obviously be on my side, right? They’ll defend their daughter’s reputation!
You haven’t met my parents.
When Jack went to ask for their blessing to propose to me, they sat him down for an hour and a half, warning him that I was stubborn and would always get my way. Oh, and they were worried about my drinking problem.
With allies like these…
I feel the need to speak on my behalf at this point. I don’t have a drinking problem. I’ve made a few poor decisions with alcohol in my 3+ decades on this earth, but I’ve never been dependent on it—emotionally or chemically—and I haven’t had time to drink in excess since I graduated college over a decade ago into one of the bleakest job markets in modern history. I’ve had to scrounge and hustle for my money. The only job I’ve had with benefits was a teaching job where I made $37k working 70 hours a week. There’s not time to drink if you’re a Millennial and your parents don’t pay your bills. So, I get hangovers after two bourbons now. I couldn’t keep up a tolerance if I wanted to.
And all of that is to say, it wouldn’t matter what the reality is.
A few data points from my teens and early twenties and a few ugly interviews from people who want to contribute to the drama of it all would be enough for everyone watching to fall into the misogynistic trap of believing I was just another evil woman who snapped and killed a good, honest man. Never mind that such a thing is extremely rare; the rarity of it makes it prime fodder for true crime shows. And for those whose only connection to crime is through those shows, they end up with a skewed idea of the frequency of the anomalous content and begin to think the things that would be considered shocking and unusual in the complete data set of homicide are actually quite commonplace.
It’s an easy bias to fall into. If you watch/listen to/read as much true crime as I do, you end up with a wealth of data points. You start to believe those data points are themselves a random sampling of the broader pool of criminal data, and therefore representative of it. But that’s not the case. The smaller data set—the one we’re shown in our entertainment—has been handpicked precisely because it is such an oddity among the greater data. Our “normal” is actually derived from the abnormal.
And because of that, if my husband went missing, I would be under suspicion. He interacts with homicidal psychopaths on a regular basis in his line of work, is the one to put a stop to their preferred activities, but I would be the person wearing the scarlet letter G for guilty.
That’s how bias works, though. We think we’re getting a full picture when we’re not. If the full picture is even presented to us (which it rarely is), we ignore most of it and pick out the bits that confirm our worldview.
Never has this harmed us more, I think, than during a pandemic when our data set is limited not only by what stories the news covers (15 articles about one topic will always make it seem more threatening than 2 articles on another topic, regardless of the content of each), but through our social media silos.
We tend to be friends with people who share our views, and that in itself chops away plenty of data points. But then the algorithms come in and serve us more people we with similar views until our feeds consist of thousands of accounts that parrot our beliefs, and we start to think, “Wow, the whole world agrees with me!”
Then comes that dissenting voice. It slips through somehow. Bad news for them. Because now they appear to be such an anomaly among the data that they can be completely dismissed, eliminated if necessary.
As we build our cases against people, is it even possible to stop and reconsider? If you want me to be guilty of homicide, why would you ignore the interviews with so-called friends and family that imply I was a loose canon with a drinking problem, that everything nice I ever did, all my work toward making this world a better place, was merely a mask I wore to distract from the real me? And why would I or anyone else ignore that for you?
If it’s possible to pause in our condemnation and reconsider, to flip the script so that kindness was the true version of the person and those angry moments and errors in judgement were only the result of an underdeveloped brain, a lack of emotional vocabulary, and a build-up of societal expectations for perfection, then maybe I could make it out of a true crime doc cleanly.
But I have no reason to believe this happens on anything resembling a regular basis.
We’d rather watch the shows and pile on without critically thinking. We’d rather not question our own cultural biases that cause us to view some people as guiltier from the get-go.
I know we’re like this, because I’m like this, too. Unless I pause and reflect.
Unfortunately, I don’t do that nearly enough. Instead, I pretend the film crew or podcast host or writer has presented me with the full set of facts, that nothing crucial has been left on the cutting room floor for the sake of time constraints, and then, based on my own comforting biases, I string together a constellation of condemnation, declare my suspicions to whoever will listen… and then move on with my life.
That’s all fine and good, until it’s me in that documentary. Or until it’s you.
And then we’re fucked.
Fascinated by the Unusual
It’s well-known Feeney family lore that I had strange viewing tastes as a child. Yes, I watched the typical Nickelodeon shows like kids my age, but I had other must-watch shows whenever I could catch them.
I was obsessed with World’s Strongest Man competitions, for instance. Despite being a bit of a tomboy (that’s what people were obligated to call girls who didn’t adhere to strict and arbitrary gender norms (i.e. didn’t like pink and did like sports)), the idea of a string-bean eight-year-old staring transfixed at the living embodiment of steroids as they lugged the Atlas stone around is something you’re allowed to chuckle at. It was an odd fascination.
Guinness World Records Primetime was another show I loved, despite the host, Cris Collinsworth (yes, the same one who routinely ruins NFL games with his obnoxious color commentary).
By the time Ripley’s Believe It or Not! was revived in 2000, I was in my teens but no less excited to watch Dean Cain show me freakish stuff without the proper cultural context.
(Side note: Does anyone else feel the need to say, “Is that Dean Cain?” every time he shows up somewhere. It’s always a surprise to me.)
Dateline was another show I would absorb into my developing brain whenever my parents weren’t around to put a stop to it. Murder, missing women, killer women, or just serial killers in general didn’t freak me out as much as intrigue me. Aware even then that this was not normal, I kept it to myself.
I didn’t get hooked on ghost hunting shows until later. All we really had in the nineties was the occasional local news segment or 20/20 story about the topic—all of which I soaked up—until Discovery Channel and Travel Channel got into the game.
At that point, I went in hard for Ghost Adventures. I think I’ve seen every episode up through season 19. (Too many demons now; it’s obnoxious.)
There’s a theme across all these preferences of mine from an early age, and no, it’s not an expression of sociopathy on my part. But I do love reading about the subject.
The theme is the fringe, the strange, the socially unacceptable. The freakish. Things, in short, that Ripley himself might not believe.
I like alarming things, not because I wish to participate in them, but because I wish to understand them. I’ve never been able to step away from an unsolved puzzle. (Hence why Unsolved Mysteries is also on my list of favorites. Just hearing the theme music on the recent reboot filled me with nostalgic joy. I have a special dance for it, which my husband just loves, but not as much as he loves me singing along while I do it.)
When something seems beyond belief (Beyond Belief was another fantastic show), my mind latches onto it until I can make sense of it. I need to know how to file it away. Resolution is required before I can move on.
Things have changed since those early days, though. I’ve learned a truth or two.
The strong men were on steroids.
Guinness World Records are often rigged and don’t usually mean anything.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is a racist shitshow that presents anything that’s not Western as “Other” in an attempt to justify pillaging and territorial occupation.
And ghost shows are fake.
In short, I’ve grown cynical. But I frequently remind people: “I’m cynical, but I’m not wrong.”
So, as all those external sources of intrigue fall away, there’s been one that hasn’t: crime.
Outside of imminent threat, what makes someone take another life? What beliefs do men hold that make them so much more likely to kill than women? How does society impact that grim decision? How do so many people claim, “He would never do that!” when, oh yes, he would and he did?
These are the puzzles that still hold my attention. The puzzles of society and humanity, of sociology and psychology, of trauma and victimization.
It’s convenient, then, that I’m married to someone in law enforcement. This wasn’t intentional. I’m not a badge bunny. In fact, I never would’ve intentionally fallen in love with a cop. I’m a fiction writer, for fuck’s sake! I have a liberal arts degree! When we met, he was an unemployed hipster, and that was way more my style. Then he sprang it on me that he wanted to apply to the Austin Police Department. Yikes. But fine. I was in love, and the job came with health benefits and a salary.
Turns out, we’re a good fit for his career choice. He has deep empathy and compassion for everyone, and I … don’t always. He de-escalates the situations and then comes home and can tell me all about them without it getting to me.
Those stories are daily puzzles for me to chew on. I try to build formulas to explain it—emotions, environment, cognitive ability, time of day, substances, cultural beliefs, personal beliefs, social history, and trauma are all variables to include.
I don’t know why I need to know the answers to all these puzzles. But if the puzzles stopped, it would be hard to keep going each day. We crave solutions to life’s mysteries while knowing that continuing to have questions is as essential to humanity as clean air or fresh water. We gobble it up, hoping that we reach an end, that we find the very last piece to the puzzle… the one that will make the rest of our lives passionless and not worth living.
Is that why I write about serial killers? I don’t know. Yet.