Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  Of course, the producers of Serial never did anything so questionable as the Murder Squad, though there are interesting parallels between the true-crime podcast and crime coverage in early daily newspapers. They were both innovations in the ways information was delivered to the public that sparked unexpectedly personal, participatory, and impassioned responses from their audiences. It’s tempting to say that we’ve come full circle, with a new true-crime boom that is victim to some of the same ethical pitfalls of the first one: Is crime journalism another industry deregulated by the anarchy of the internet? But as Michelle Dean wrote in the Guardian of Serial, “This is exactly the problem with doing journalism at all . . . You might think you are doing a simple crime podcast . . . and then you become a sensation, as Serial has, and the story falls to the mercy of the thousands, even millions, of bored and curious people on the internet.”

  Simply by merit of their popularity, highbrow crime stories are often riskier than their lowbrow counterparts. Kathryn Schulz wrote in The New Yorker about the ways the makers of the Netflix series Making a Murderer, in their attempt to advocate for the convicted murderer Steven Avery, omit evidence that incriminates him and put forth an incoherent argument for his innocence. Advocacy and intervention are complicated actions for journalists to undertake, though they are not novel. Schulz points to a scene in Making a Murderer where a Dateline producer who is covering Avery is shown saying, “Right now murder is hot.” In this moment the creators of Making a Murderer are drawing a distinction between themselves and Dateline, as Schulz writes, implying that, “unlike traditional true-crime shows . . . their work is too intellectually serious to be thoughtless, too morally worthy to be cruel.” But they were not only trying to invalidate Avery’s conviction; they (like Dateline, but more effectively) were also creating an addictive product, a compelling story.

  That is maybe what irks me the most about true crime with highbrow pretensions. It appeals to the same vices as traditional true crime, and often trades in the same melodrama and selective storytelling, but its consequences can be more extreme. Adnan Syed was granted a new trial after Serial brought attention to his case; Avery was denied his appeal, but people involved in his case have nevertheless been doxxed and threatened. I’ve come to believe that addictiveness and advocacy are rarely compatible. If they were, why would the creators of Making a Murderer have advocated for one white man, when the story of being victimized by a corrupt police force is common to so many people across the US, particularly people of color?

  It does feel like a shame that so many resources are going to create slick, smart true crime that asks the wrong questions, focusing our energy on individual stories instead of the systemic problems they represent. But in truth, this is probably a feature, not a bug. I suspect the new true-crime obsession has something to do with the massive, terrifying problems we face as a society: government corruption, mass violence, corporate greed, income inequality, police brutality, environmental degradation, human-rights violations. These are large-scale crimes whose resolutions, though not mysterious, are also not forthcoming. Focusing on one case, bearing down on its minutiae and discovering who is to blame, serves as both an escape and a means of feeling in control, giving us an arena where justice is possible.

  Skepticism about whether journalists appropriate their subjects’ stories, about high and low, and about why we enjoy the crime stories we do, all swirl through what I think of as the post–true crime moment. Post–true crime is explicitly or implicitly about the popularity of the new true-crime wave, questioning its place in our culture, and resisting or responding to its conventions. One interesting document of post–true crime is My Favorite Murder and other “comedy murder podcasts,” which, in retelling stories murder buffs have heard on one million Investigation Discovery shows, unpack the ham-fisted clichés of the true-crime genre. They show how these stories appeal to the most gruesome sides of our personalities and address the obvious but unspoken fact that true crime is entertainment, and often the kind that is as mindless as a sitcom. Even more cutting is the Netflix parody American Vandal, which both codifies and spoofs the conventions of the new highbrow true crime, roasting the genre’s earnest tone in its depiction of a Serial-like investigation of some lewd graffiti.

  There is also the trend in the post–true crime era of dramatizing famous crime stories, like in The Bling Ring; I, Tonya; and Ryan Murphy’s anthology series American Crime Story, all of which dwell not only on the stories of infamous crimes but also why they captured the public imagination. There is a camp element in these retellings, particularly when famous actors like John Travolta and Sarah Paulson are hamming it up in ridiculous wigs. But this self-consciousness often works to these projects’ advantage, allowing them to show heightened versions of the cultural moments that led to the most outsize tabloid crime stories. Many of these fictionalized versions take journalistic accounts as their source material, like Nancy Jo Sales’s reporting in Vanity Fair for The Bling Ring and ESPN’s documentary on Tonya Harding, The Price of Gold, for I, Tonya. This seems like a best-case scenario for prestige true crime to me: parsing famous cases from multiple angles and in multiple genres, trying to understand them both on the level of individual choices and cultural forces.

  Perhaps the most significant contributions to post–true crime, though, are the recent wave of personal accounts about murder and crime: literary memoirs like Down City by Leah Carroll, Mean by Myriam Gurba, The Hot One by Carolyn Murnick, After the Eclipse by Sarah Perry, and We Are All Shipwrecks by Kelly Grey Carlisle all tell the stories of murder seen from close-up. (It is significant that all of these books are by women. Carroll, Perry, and Carlisle all write about their mothers’ murders, placing them in the tradition of James Ellroy’s great memoir My Dark Places, but without the tortured, fetish-y tone.) This is not a voyeuristic first person, and the reader can’t detach and find joy in procedure; we are finally confronted with the truth of lives upended by violence and grief. There’s also Ear Hustle, the brilliant podcast produced by the inmates of San Quentin State Prison. The makers of Ear Hustle sometimes contemplate the bad luck and bad decisions that led them to be incarcerated, but more often they discuss the concerns of daily life in prison, like food, sex, and how to make mascara from an inky page from a magazine. This is a crime podcast that is the opposite of sensational, addressing the systemic truth of crime and the justice system, in stories that are mundane, profound, and, yes, addictive.

  Originally published by Vulture, August 2018

  The Lost Children of “Runaway Train”

  By Elon Green

  On a Friday morning in April 1990, Christopher Matthew Kerze, 17, told his mother, Alona, he had a headache. And so, having no reason to suspect otherwise, she agreed he could stay home from school, and went to work.

  When she returned at 3 that afternoon, Alona found a note on the kitchen table, written in Christopher’s scrawl:

  Mom,

  Something important came up + feeling somewhat better.

  Back by six. (Unless I get lost.)

  Love,

  Chris

  The words “get lost” were underlined twice.

  Alona found that the family van was gone, and their dog, B.W. Bowser, who tended to be leashed during the day, had gotten loose, which she thought was odd.

  By 10 p.m., there was still no sign of her son. Alona called her sister, who lived in the area. Then she called her husband, Jim, who had left the Kerzes’ house in Eagan, Minnesota, early that morning. A credit analyst, he’d gone to Wisconsin on business. Jim immediately drove home, and he pulled into the driveway around midnight.

  Still no sign of Christopher.

  It was at this time that Patrick, Christopher’s younger brother, told his parents that Jim’s Mossberg bolt-action 20-gauge shotgun, which was kept in a closet—separate from the ammunition—was gone.

  “We just went crazy at that moment,” said Jim.

  CHRISTOPHER’S DISAPPEARANCE DID NOT, AT FIR
ST, RECEIVE much media attention. Eagan, a city of about 64,000, has a fair number of such cases. “It wouldn’t be unusual for us to have two or three runaway missing person cases in a weekend,” said Stefanie Bolks, a detective in the Eagan Police Department who calls herself “a longtime copper.” Since Christopher went missing, she said, hundreds of minors in her jurisdiction have run away. But only one other person—a young woman who has been gone for two and a half years—remains unaccounted for.

  Occasionally, said Bolks, the kids are fleeing abusive homes. But mostly, she said, they simply don’t want to abide by house rules, and their disappearance is relatively brief—no more than a day or two. “I mean, we have regulars that take off every Thursday or Friday, and then they’re gone for the long weekend,” she said. “A lot of times, it’s just that the kids are incorrigible.”

  Not so with Christopher, however. “What you need to know is, he’s always been a very great kid,” Jim told me. He was a National Merit Scholar semifinalist; he was invited to join the National Honor Society; and, even as a gangly teen, he’d made the high school swim team. Though never a top-tier competitor, he twice made the regionals. Watching Christopher swim the medley—breaststroke, crawl, backstroke, and fly—is one of Jim’s fondest memories. “He gets an ovation when he’s done,” he said. “His time stunk, but who cares? He actually did it.”

  Christopher loved to camp. Loved to ski. He was adept at playing with the software of a computer—an original Macintosh—back when such an activity was still relatively esoteric. A friend’s dad owned a warehouse, and they’d play laser tag. He played cello in grade school, clarinet in junior high and high school. “He was a smart kid, a good sense of humor,” Jim said.

  When Bolks inherited the case, in 1994, Christopher had been gone four years. The local investigation had reached a dead end. Nothing was found of the boy’s clothing, his glasses or the gun, and the police department had received only “a handful” of tips. But there was reason to hope that all this might change, as Christopher’s case had recently gotten a great deal of publicity.

  THE ATTENTION CAME IN THE FORM OF A MUSIC VIDEO for a song called “Runaway Train” by the alternative rock band Soul Asylum, who, in 1993, were at the height of their success. The group had just released their sixth—and most popular—album, Grave Dancers Union, which ended up going triple platinum. “Runaway Train”—which would remain on the Billboard charts for more than 40 weeks, and which the band would play at Bill Clinton’s inaugural ball—was one of its singles.

  The idea for the song’s video had begun with a milk carton—and, by extension, another missing kid.

  Etan Patz, abducted in SoHo in May 1979, may be the most famous missing American child of the last half century, and the case’s fame rests, in part, on Patz’s face being displayed on the side of a milk carton. Depending on whom you ask, his was either the first or among the first. And that lit the spark for the video, its director, Tony Kaye, has said: “I was being driven home one night and I saw a poster—I think it was a milk poster . . . where it was missing kids on the carton.”

  “Runaway Train” is a power ballad about depression. But Kaye decided the music video ought to be about something else: missing children. Over the course of four and a half minutes, the video toggles between footage of the band singing—the stuff of traditional music videos—and kids making a break for it; at the end, it depicts an abduction. Dotted throughout are photos and names of real missing children along with the date on which each disappeared.

  Securing photos of those children required the help of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and its founder, Ernie Allen. In a recent conversation with me, Allen recalled the power and efficacy of the milk carton campaign. “Photos of missing children work,” he said, with the fervor of a man who has been making that argument for a long time. If enough people are armed with the best possible images and information, he reasoned, there’s a much better chance of locating and recovering a missing child. (The milk carton campaign, the origins of which are murky, fell by the wayside after Dr. Benjamin Spock and others suggested it needlessly scared children.)

  When Kaye approached him, Allen was enthusiastic. He felt, and Kaye agreed, it was best to focus on “endangered runaways,” which the US Department of Justice would eventually define as children who had been “physically or sexually abused at home” or were “substance dependent” or “in the company of someone known to be abusing drugs.”

  Further requisites: The children had to have been missing for at least a couple of years; their absence must have been reported to the police and entered into the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s national crime database; and, finally, it was imperative that parents grant permission to disseminate their child’s photo.

  At the time, according to Allen, there were 1.6 million runaways a year. While many return home after a short time, Allen knew it was the kids who had been gone awhile that were at greater risk for harm. The reality, to which “Runaway Train” alludes in its closing minute, is that sometimes what looks like a runaway is actually an abduction. “You don’t ever really know, in most missing persons cases, what the circumstances are,” Allen noted.

  In any case, he said, the video was “an opportunity to provide massive exposure to a huge segment of the population that may not routinely see missing child photos, and making whoever sees these photos think, I might be able to do something. I might have actually seen this person.” So Allen agreed to help Kaye and the band. But first, he extracted a promise from Kaye: If any child were recovered, his or her photo must be immediately removed from circulation and replaced with the photo of another missing child. What this meant, in practice, was that if things went according to plan, Kaye would have to repeatedly recut the video.

  When the video debuted in May 1993, 13 children were featured. Sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Wiles was the first to come home.

  “I LIKED A GUY WHO WAS OLDER THAN ME AND MY PARENTS told me no,” said Liz Vatovec, née Wiles. She’s now 39, and lives with her husband outside of Nashville, where she is a real estate broker and a licensed contractor. It was oddly jarring to realize that the blond kid from the decades-old photo of her reunion with her mother was my senior.

  I contacted a few of the children—that is, the lucky ones who lived to no longer be children—from “Runaway Train.” Of the ones I reached out to, only Vatovec agreed to be interviewed.

  Wiles, then 13, left her family’s home in Lamar, Arkansas. She and her boyfriend, Ron, hitchhiked to California, where she and her family had lived before moving to Arkansas. He worked odd jobs until they could afford a place of their own. They told anyone who inquired that she was 17. “People didn’t seem to be overly concerned about a 17-year-old having a dysfunctional family and leaving home, and people kind of sympathized with me a little bit and just looked the other way,” she said.

  They stayed for two and a half years.

  In May 1993, Elizabeth and Ron were at a friend’s house in San Diego. The television was on, and they weren’t paying much attention to it. But then Wiles saw her own face on MTV. Her biological father, Duane, had—without consulting Elizabeth’s mother, Debra, from whom he was divorced—given her photo to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The video had begun airing that month.

  “I just kind of freaked out,” she said.

  A week later—she’d hesitated, at first—Elizabeth called her mother, who had not heard from the girl, not even a postcard, since she’d left home. As they wept, Elizabeth apologized and said she wanted to come home. There were no recriminations; Debra was just happy to have her back.

  Her mother, Elizabeth tells me, always suspected she was alive, though she didn’t know for sure. “She said that she knew I was okay, that if there was something wrong, she would know,” Elizabeth said. “She tried not to worry about me.” “Did you really not contact her?” I asked. “I can be a stubborn person,” she said. “It’s not a good quality of mine.”


  When she came home, there was a return to relative normalcy. There were house rules she had to abide by. After a few months, Elizabeth got a GED. She attended college but never finished.

  Her lack of traditional schooling is one of her regrets. “I still go back and wonder if I could’ve become a scientist or went into quantum physics or something,” she said. “I’m okay with it, though. Again, I have a really nice life. [Running away] made me who I am.”

  Elizabeth met Soul Asylum once, backstage at a concert in Little Rock, and in August 1993 she appeared on NBC with her mother, the band’s frontman Dave Pirner, and Ernie Allen. She’s had no contact with the band since then, but the song that brought her home has remained a part of her life. “I probably hear it a handful of times a year,” she said. “Sometimes we’re at a store or whatever, and they’ve got the music playing in the background. That song comes on, and of course my husband now knows everything about it. We’re shopping, and we just both pause like, Okay, nobody else knows the meaning of that to us.”

  BECAUSE OF SOUL ASYLUM’S AGREEMENT THAT THE video would be recut whenever one of its runaways returned home, multiple versions exist. One of the versions on YouTube has far more views than the others: nearly 60 million. It’s in that version—if you stop it at precisely 3 minutes and 30 seconds—that you can see a photo of Martha Wes Dunn. In the photo, she is holding a black dog. The 15-year-old, who had a scar on her cheek from a childhood injury, vanished from Daingerfield, Texas, on September 5, 1990. Her father reported her missing around five the next morning, and Deputy Martha Cox took the case.

  I spoke about Dunn’s case with Morris County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Robbie Gray, who has been on it since 1999. Dunn had been in Oklahoma with some relatives. Her parents had brought her home to Texas to start the school year on September 4. She’d been unhappy about it and they’d argued. The last time they saw her was at home on September 5 around 2:20 p.m. It’s known that that night, around 10, Dunn spoke with her boyfriend, 17-year-old Eric Owens, by phone. The next day, she and Owens were gone.