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.