Killings

Killings (1984) By Calvin Trillin

Genre: Anthology of true crime back when that genre at its highest form was pursued by some semblance of discipline if not necessarily outright respect, so that any fascination the reader got out of the tragedy was balanced against a tacit agreement to attempt to learn something about ourselves through the study of human nature.

Recommended For: Someone who hears about something awful and wants to hear a few more details but often doesn’t because the only mechanisms to receive that information are gross and irresponsible (or untrue), but at the end of the day they have to admit they’re…intrigued.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

I spent four years working on a true crime story.

About five months in, I had conducted a couple hours of interviews and had a small folder (that’s small relative to the very larger binder I would have later) of documents on the case of three girls who had gone missing in my hometown four decades earlier.

I was not a true crime writer. I was, and still am, a writer drawn by my curiosities. A less generous description would be a “generalist.” It’s a shaky way of pursuing a career in media because what might look at first like casting a wide net really never affords you any veneer of credibility or authority in one space. By that point I had written quite a bit of humor for the New Yorker (my author bio has two landing pages, not to brag). I had written over a thousand stories reporting from Dallas Cowboys and Dallas Mavericks locker rooms. I had reported on Texas politics, art, technology, and an immense amount about music. But to anyone assigning or even reading in any of those genre buckets, there were always writers committing their full time to that one thing, making me look like a hobbyist by comparison. You can imagine why I was also working at bar for much of this time (we haven’t even touched on the rapid decline of written media happening concurrently).

But the point is that I was not a true crime writer, and of all the types of work my curiosities were leading me to, it was probably the one in which a lack of experience made the task ahead of me most daunting.

Armed with my interviews and documents and more of a sense of this case than anyone who had written about in at least 15 years, I emailed an editor and was honest that the story was not fully understood in my head but that I knew I had one. Sympathetic, she basically said, “You need help,” and enlisted a veteran reporter who lived in my city, one who had reported on climate disaster, local politics, and traveled to Ukraine to chase stories of conflict and intrigue.

We met at a coffee shop and spread documents over a table, and she asked questions, and we pieced together clues, and to the other patrons, it looked like something out of a movie. She set me on a helpful course, and over the next few years we checked in, and she’d generally have some helpful advice.

But it was in that first meeting that she suggested I check out the writer Calvin Trillin for inspiration. He was a true crime writer who had started at the New Yorker in the 1960s. Another great Dallas reporter, Skip Hollandsworth, (who has also given me advice over the years) had told her to read Trillins and this seemed like a good opportunity to pass it forward.

I looked some of his stuff up and internalized what I could. I ordered Killings, a collection of his stories, to have as a reference book. Most writers have a personal library, and there’s a section of books that are utilitarian. Books about writing. Books on subjects that you are likely to have to look up facts and anecdotes about at one point or another. Books with sections or passages that it would ultimately benefit your writing for you to read.

As an adult learner, I’m not much of a 1+1 = 2 sort of guy, unless it’s crunch time, which it rarely is if I’m lucky. You’re unlikely to see me taking notes (except in my day job, I have to acquiesce to direct, in-the-moment learning). I prefer to spend my days soaking in what looks interesting and seeing what sticks in my brain.

Burning through Killings, I realize I was probably spending a lot of those four years trying to compensate for not being able to do what Trillin could do and creating something different. That realization might have driven me mad back then. Now, I can peacefully say these stories are about as artful as real life tragedy can be made to appear.

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“True Crime” as we currently think about it is mostly a scourge on society. It’s deeply exploitative and mines the worst instincts in human nature. The idea that you could go out into your community and do something and are instead letting Netflix or Hulu serve you up a cheaply made documentary about murder or sexual crimes heightened by flash cuts and synths is unsettling. You only have one life to live.

There’s an intense churn of “content” that heinous crimes are not immune to. Epstein or P. Diddy documentaries. Unsolved murder cases (or solved ones). They are every bit as salacious as early 2000s paparazzi, but they understand the tones they are supposed to hit on to seem prestigious.

It’s not a matter of dehumanizing the victims. They are disrespecting them, sure. But they are dehumanizing society. Creating a more fearful one in place of reality. Skilled true crime writing could take a horrific incident, underscore the extreme rarity of it, and extrapolate that there is human nature at the heart of every angle of it, which is both alarming and worth thinking about. Most Netflix documentaries invert that formula: These crimes are meant to feel pervasive (I mean just look at your algorithm). The perpetrators are not meant to be seen as real humans or if they are, they are seen as “The Fall of The Successful Man.” Any of us could be victims.

The podcasts know what to tease to seem like we could all be detectives. And they make a lot of money on the backs of the reporting of real true crime reporters. I will admit one of these true crime podcasters did a two-part podcast (four total hours of podcast) on the case I wrote about that was at one point almost reading my story word for word. She eventually referenced my story, but she never linked to the story even after I contacted her requesting her to. She has over one million subscribers. She linked to her merch store.

That doesn’t, of course, mean that the exploitation hasn’t existed before social media, Netflix, Youtube and podcasts. True crime, at least in so far as our fascination with it, has always had its problematic elements. And that has a little bit to do with figuring out “why are we this way?” and a little bit more to do with examining general biases.

One way of putting it would be to ask yourself to think of a generic true crime case. Not a real one. Just imagine what that might be when those words come up. I won’t presume what you specifically are thinking, but I can tell you what a lot of people imagine. They are imagining a female victim. She is almost certainly white. There is a slightly disproportionate chance she is blonde. There is nearly a guarantee that the perpetrator is a man.

That is because a salacious story that has been told throughout time and has helped reinforce ideas about the weakness of women and the dangers of cities (and in some cases, the threat of certain kinds of men). Obviously, women have to contend with many threats from men, but that reality is not backed up by very strong evidence that they will be chopped up into a bunch of pieces by some sort of looming Hanibal Lector character and is much more supported by statistics around date rape perpetrated by men they know well. I only say that as to suggest that society and parents’ fears and advice should reflect what is accurately happening, not what is commonly pushed as entertainment.

What you are less likely to have imagined when you heard the words “true crime” were, say, a drive-by shooting in Baltimore, despite it literally being a true crime, and a much more common example of an unsolved case. This has to do with how society thinks about people, not how it thinks about crime.

Still, I would recommend Killings. It’s nearly impossible to put down. But it accomplishes something very core and basic to what good writing can when approaching a tragedy. It collects facts and makes you walk up to the idea of Once there was a life here, and now there is not, and sometimes it does that for both victim and perpetrator.

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There were moments when I thought I was going to solve the 45-year-old missing person case. At one point, I was convinced I had a combination of the most information on the case and the most rational understanding of that information of anyone alive. Part of me still believes that.

But I accepted that I would never solve it. Besides, I knew how dangerous obsession was. The story I wanted to tell was different. I titled it “Portrait of a True Crime Character.” It won an award (got a little money, heck yeah). Then I commissioned it to a publication which went out of business (this happens a lot when you work in a dying industry). Luckily the dying publication already paid me. With the cash in my pocket, I felt comfortable selling it for cheap to the alt weekly of my hometown, where the girls disappeared.

If you want to read the story, you can click here.

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