Dedication
To those who find meaning, solace, catharsis, and outrage in crime stories, which is all of us
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction by Patrick Radden Keefe
Editor’s Note
Part I: Narrative Features
Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter to Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered by Michelle Dean
The Reckoning by Pamela Colloff
Jennifer Pan’s Revenge by Karen K. Ho
The Perfect Man Who Wasn’t by Rachel Monroe
Part II: Where Crime Meets Culture
Out Came the Girls by Alex Mar
The End of Evil by Sarah Marshall
The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime by Alice Bolin
The Lost Children of “Runaway Train” by Elon Green
The True Crime Story Behind a 1970s Cult Feminist Film Classic by Sarah Weinman
Part III: Justice and Society
What Bullets Do to Bodies by Jason Fagone
Checkpoint Nation by Melissa Del Bosque
How a Dubious Forensic Science Spread Like a Virus by Leora Smith
“I Am a Girl Now,” Sage Smith Wrote. Then She Went Missing. by Emma Copley Eisenberg
Acknowledgments
Other Notable Crime Stories: What to Read, Listen To, and Watch
Contributors
Permissions
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
By Patrick Radden Keefe
When I was in fourth grade, kids told stories about a killer who was supposedly stalking the area. This was in Milton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, in the mid-1980s. The man drove a Chevy Nova and carried a knife, my classmates said. He was known as the Milton Quincy Stabber. I don’t have many specific recollections of fourth grade, but I can vividly remember walking out of art class, positively vibrating with terror. The stabber was at large, in our area, and would almost certainly stab again. I suddenly became attuned to the make and model of every approaching car, though the Milton Quincy Stabber was said to direct his violence only at women.
If I ever learned what became of the Milton Quincy Stabber, I have forgotten. Which is strange, when you think about it, because even as children, we are drawn to the puzzle of crime narratives, and if we read them compulsively it’s often because we feel compelled to hunt for a solution. My favorite part of any Sherlock Holmes story was always the final scene, when the great detective reassembles the random clues into a coherent narrative that is legible only in retrospect. Was the stabber apprehended? If I bothered to find out as a kid, the memory hasn’t lingered. What has stayed with me, indelibly, is that first vicarious brush with the concept of random murder: the whiff of mortal fear, the revelation that sometimes life doesn’t stretch out before you in an unbroken path to old age. Sometimes it terminates, abruptly, when a stranger pulls over in his Chevy Nova.
A few years ago, I spent some time back in Massachusetts to report the story of an unrelated killing, and while I was there, I started thinking about the Milton Quincy Stabber. When I ran the phrase through Google, however, nothing came up. My mind flipped through a sequence of bizarre explanations. Had one of my fourth-grade classmates invented the stabber? This was a feature of childhood before the advent of the search engine: nobody fact-checked anything. Wild legends circulated, like the one about the untimely death of little Mikey, who made the suicidal mistake of mixing Coke and Pop Rocks. But could someone have invented a serial killer? Even as I weighed this possibility, a more troubling scenario presented itself: Could I have concocted the story myself? As a child, I had a febrile imagination—not a fantasy life per se, but the attention of an actuary to the probability of improbable catastrophes. I slept with the lights on for years. Could I have somehow fantasized the stabber?
I mention all this because the whole episode captures two distinct elements of our relationship with stories about real crimes. The first is that, from childhood, we are hardwired to be fascinated by danger, and by the dark potential of other humans. When you read a Patricia Highsmith novel, the abyss of human depravity into which you peer runs only as deep as Highsmith’s imagination. But a true story of human cruelty engages—and implicates—the reader in a more profound and unsettling way.
The story of the Milton Quincy Stabber was also a story, with the familiar contours of a fairy tale: a predator, a string of innocent victims, a hunting ground that children should avoid. If “true crime” is enjoying a renaissance at the moment, I think it is at least in part a function of narrative modalities: bingeable, long-form, serialized storytelling lends itself particularly well to tales of investigation. At the same time, any journalist seeking to incorporate the truth of an actual crime into some engaging narrative construct must contend with very real moral hazard. The most engaging crime stories often take the form of a mystery or a thriller. But if they’re true, they are also, almost always, tragedies. The more lurid the story, the more likely the victims—and the real human costs of the crime—are to be forgotten.
For the crime reporter, certain forms of selection bias can also take hold. “Narrative” tends to mean characters—protagonists and antagonists, conflict and motivation—and crime writing has historically favored certain sorts of characters (white female murder victims, to take the most glaring example) to the exclusion of others. There’s a subtler danger, too, when we focus on stories of individual characters and crimes, because the greatest crimes, now and always, have been systemic, and systemic stories are harder to tell. One conspicuous upside of the current boom in crime reportage is that it has created space and demand and recognition for writing about crime that is more representative—and for an approach to crime writing that grapples more overtly with these risks. On both counts, the collection you are about to read is exemplary and overdue.
As I was preparing to write this introduction, I searched one more time for the Milton Quincy Stabber, and found an article I’d missed when I looked before, a UPI story from January 1987, with the headline, “Hunt for Stabber Intensifies.” Over a three-week period that winter, a man named William Marguetty stabbed four women in Milton and Quincy. They all survived, but before he was apprehended that March, he murdered a twenty-seven-year-old named Ann Gillietti. She was found stabbed to death in her apartment in a Roslindale housing project. In a typical failure of crime reportage, I could find hardly any information about Gillietti online, apart from the fact of her murder—and the terrible detail that she was not alone in the apartment when her killer arrived; her two-year-old daughter was with her and survived the attack.
Marguetty was eventually convicted of murder and attempted murder, and sentenced to life in prison. He had arrived in the United States on the Mariel boatlift in 1980, after being released from a prison in Cuba. “Victims have provided different descriptions of the attacker’s car,” the UPI reported. But two of the women said it might have been “a rust-colored Chevy Nova.” I hadn’t imagined the story, nor had my classmates. We just had the wrong dime-store nickname. In the press, Marguetty wasn’t the Milton Quincy Stabber but the South Shore Stalker.
Editor’s Note
True crime is having a moment. But then, one could say true crime has been having a moment for more than three centuries, since the New England–based minister Cotton Mather published his execution sermons for eager Puritan audiences, then, with an altogether different pamphlet, laid the groundwork for the Salem Witch Trials in 1692.
Lately, it’s felt different. More highbrow. More participatory. More investigative. More in the public interest. More reflective, critical, even postmodern. The current state of the genre has broadened far past storie
s once reliably contained within the pages of mass-market paperbacks, covers with dripping fonts. Or tabloid-friendly tales slickly packaged into programs that air on Investigation Discovery, Oxygen, and Lifetime.
The new true crime moment dates to the fall of 2014, when the radio program This American Life presented the first series of its podcast spinoff, Serial. Sarah Koenig’s week-by-week account of the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, the incarceration of Adnan Syed, and why his conviction could have been a wrongful one was not just a hit but a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Everyone who was anyone listened to Serial, even if they had never consumed—or knew they were consuming—true crime before then.
Serial’s astonishing success paved the way for even stronger, more superbly reported podcasts, such as In the Dark, Bear Brook (where victim and perpetrator identification led to the burgeoning field of forensic genealogy for cold cases), Bundyville, and S-Town. Television and streaming documentaries like The Jinx and Making a Murderer expanded the storytelling range so our appetites could handle the epic, Oscar-winning O.J.: Made in America. And the state of policing and criminal justice, then and now, yielded outstanding recent books like Ghettoside by Jill Leovy, They Can’t Kill Us All by Wesley Lowery, Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, and American Prison by Shane Bauer.
The fascination with murder and illegality is a perennial one, because the shock of the deed creates a schism between order and chaos. We wish for justice, but even when we get it, the result rings somewhat hollow. We gorge on facts and innuendo but are then left with the hangover of trauma, the aftermath of a system that too often fails people. We crave a narrative that restores righteousness but are left with scraps of barely connected meaning.
The last few years of true crime storytelling have dwelled on the messiness. One important strand, as coined by WNYC’s On the Media in 2017, is “true innocence,” where convictions yield questions and possible exoneration. It’s less who did it than why did she falsely confess, or what mistakes did the prosecutor or detective or lab technician make? Season two of In the Dark, the landmark podcast from American Public Media hosted by Madeleine Baran, uncovered so many inconsistencies in the case of Curtis Flowers, tried six times for an early-1990s quadruple murder in Winona, Mississippi, that its reporting helped lead the Supreme Court to reverse Flowers’s most recent conviction.
The genre is also much more interactive. The proliferation of podcasts in particular creates communities of would-be amateur sleuths with a vested interest in seeing their pet cold (and not-so-cold) cases solved. Those communities are also spaces for finding friendship and comfort among those who love true crime, as the “Murderinos” who listen avidly to Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff’s hit comedy podcast My Favorite Murder can attest.
Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, her posthumous 2018 blend of crime reporting and memoir on the Golden State Killer case, was as much a paean to the web of internet users equally invested in uncovering the killer’s identity. That forensic genealogy—itself a discipline spearheaded by amateurs working outside law enforcement—brought about the identification and arrest of Joseph DeAngelo in April 2018, is as much a testament to nontraditional methods leading to the resolution of long-dormant cases.
That sense of interactivity helps explain the recent and parallel rise of the true-crime memoir. Those who have been directly affected by crime are giving voice to their own experiences in beautifully crafted works. Well-reported literary nonfiction such as Down City by Leah Carroll, You All Grow Up and Leave Me by Piper Weiss, The Hot One by Carolyn Murnick, and After the Eclipse by Sarah Perry, as well as podcasts like The Ballad of Billy Balls by iO Tillett Wright, illuminate how the violent death of a loved one causes lifelong ramifications that don’t stop with the finished, produced work.
As I wrote for the Guardian in 2016: “a book or a documentary or a podcast is now seen as the continuation, even the beginning, of a crime story, not the end.” Internet sleuths hold themselves up as better than professional detectives, and sometimes they prove to be right. The dichotomy of true crime is not about high versus low culture, but is between observer and participant. It’s no longer enough to be horrified or morally outraged. Now, it seems, the perennial fascination that is murder has the power to make us act, even if our actions are futile.
IF TRUE CRIME IS HAVING A MOMENT, HOW BEST TO chronicle that moment? I am a creator and consumer of true crime. I’ve published true crime features and essays critiquing the genre. My own book, The Real Lolita, is a hybrid of crime investigation and literary criticism. I haven’t read every single book, watched every documentary, or listened to every podcast—that would, quite simply, be impossible—but in our post-Serial world, it has been breathtaking to watch this genre I’ve loved my whole life grow and change, bend back upon itself, open itself up for serious criticism, and accept the possibility that its constraints can be crested.
The time seemed ripe for an anthology of recent writing about true crime across the broadest possible spectrum. Some years ago, there were annual anthologies under the banner of The Best American Crime Reporting, collections that affirmed to me that many of my favorite nonfiction writers journeyed into the land of crime and often stayed there for good. But in the years since those anthologies ceased to be, a new and fresh crop of crime writers has arrived.
They centered the victims as human beings rather than rely on the trope of beautiful white dead girls. They widened the storytelling lens far beyond the individual to the collective. They explored different subcultures and communities. They paid attention to stark topics like inequality, poverty, housing, and addiction, all of which affect and are affected by crime. They were women and people of color. They were unafraid to call out the problems inherent to what I think of as the “true crime industrial complex,” which turns crime and murder into entertainment for the masses.
They are the present, and the future, of this genre. Unspeakable Acts includes a baker’s dozen of these writers, separated into three broad categories.
The first section highlights more classic crime features. Pamela Colloff, indisputably among the great nonfiction crime writers of the twenty-first century, is here with one of her final features for Texas Monthly, where she worked for nearly two decades. Michelle Dean’s BuzzFeed feature, the basis for the Hulu series The Act (which Dean cocreated), is here in print for the very first time. Rachel Monroe, author of the standout book of true crime criticism Savage Appetites, is here with a con artist tale that reflects, and stands apart from, the plethora of pieces on grifters, scammers, and frauds. And Canadian journalist Karen K. Ho blends personal history and dogged reporting with her stellar story on a girl expected to excel, with catastrophic results.
Section two gets more meta, looking at how true crime interacts with culture as well as itself. Author and documentary filmmaker Alex Mar compares and contrasts two stories of fatal girlhood friendship—one from the 1950s, one from a few years ago—and finds eerie parallels. Sarah Marshall, cohost of the wonderful You’re Wrong About podcast, traces America’s obsession with serial killer Ted Bundy and finds him, and us, profoundly wanting. Alice Bolin, author of the indispensable essay collection Dead Girls, takes direct aim at why we’re in this true crime moment, and what it erases. Elon Green digs for the heartbreaking stories behind a legendary music video’s photo montage of missing children. And my own contribution to the anthology is on the ill-fated bank robbery, and the fascinating woman involved in it, that inspired Barbara Loden’s cult feminist film Wanda.
The third and final section widens the scope to broader issues of criminal justice and society. Jason Fagone embeds with a Philadelphia emergency-room doctor who is fed up at the number of shootings and the devastating human toll of gun violence. Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of The Third Rainbow Girl, introduces us to a black transgender teenager named Sage Smith, and how her murder, and the neglect in solving the case, rippled across a town. Finally, Leora Smith profiles Herbert MacDonell, the s
o-called father of blood-spatter analysis, and how his methods inspired all manner of junk science in the courtroom.
Consuming and creating true crime is an ethically thorny endeavor, as it always was, and as it must be. But the pieces included in Unspeakable Acts go a long way to make the world a more just, more empathetic place.
Part I
Narrative Features
Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter to Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered
By Michelle Dean
For seven years before the murder, Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blancharde lived in a small pink bungalow on West Volunteer Way in Springfield, Missouri. Their neighbors liked them. “‘Sweet’ is the word I’d use,” a former friend of Dee Dee’s told me not too long ago. Once you met them, people said, they were impossible to forget.
Dee Dee was 48 years old, originally from Louisiana. She was a large, affable-looking person, which she reinforced by dressing in bright, cheerful colors. She had curly brown hair she liked to hold back with ribbons. People who knew her remember her as generous with her time and, when she could be, generous with money. She could make friends quickly and inspire deep devotion. She did not have a job, but instead served as a full-time caretaker for Gypsy Rose, her teenage daughter.
Gypsy was a tiny thing, perhaps five feet tall as far as anyone could guess. She was confined to a wheelchair. Her round face was overwhelmed by a pair of owlish glasses. She was pale and skinny, and her teeth were crumbling and painful. She had a feeding tube. Sometimes Dee Dee had to drag an oxygen tank around with them, nasal cannula looped around Gypsy’s small ears. Ask about her daughter’s diagnoses, and Dee Dee would reel off a list as long as her arm: chromosomal defects, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, severe asthma, sleep apnea, eye problems. It had always been this way, Dee Dee said, ever since Gypsy was a baby. She had spent time in neonatal intensive care. She’d had leukemia as a toddler.
Unspeakable Acts Page 1
