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The American Consumption of True Crime Michigan Technological University Digital Commons @ Michigan Tech Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports 2015 IDENTITY AND RITUAL: THE AMERICAN CONSUMPTION OF TRUE CRIME Rebecca Frost Michigan Technological University, [email protected] Copyright 2015 Rebecca Frost Recommended Citation Frost, Rebecca, "IDENTITY AND RITUAL: THE AMERICAN CONSUMPTION OF TRUE CRIME", Open Access Dissertation, Michigan Technological University, 2015. https://doi.org/10.37099/mtu.dc.etdr/17 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/etdr IDENTITY AND RITUAL: THE AMERICAN CONSUMPTION OF TRUE CRIME By Rebecca Lee Frost A DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In Rhetoric, Theory and Culture MICHIGAN TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY 2015 ©2015 Rebecca L. Frost This dissertation has been approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Rhetoric, Theory and Culture. Department of Humanities Dissertation Advisor: Kette Thomas Committee Member: Diane Shoos Committee Member: Marilyn Cooper Committee Member: Adam Feltz Department Chair: Ronald Strickland iii Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 2 Chapter One – American Crime Narratives, Past and Present ............................................ 5 True Crime: An American Genre .................................................................................... 6 Crime and Restoration: The Evolving Ritual ................................................................ 13 Chapter Two – Rituals and Spectacle: The Origins of the Criminal in the Crime Genre 15 Defining Genre .............................................................................................................. 17 Ritual, Taboo, and Restoration ...................................................................................... 22 American Crime Narratives .......................................................................................... 27 Communicating About Crime in Early America........................................................... 28 The Execution Sermon’s Approach to the Condemned ................................................ 34 Exploiting the Role of the Criminal: Esther Rodgers ................................................... 37 From the Pulpit: The Power of the Minister ................................................................. 41 The Rise of the Secular Crime Narrative ...................................................................... 44 Active Readers .............................................................................................................. 48 Changing Format, Continuing Ritual ............................................................................ 50 Chapter Three – Evidence: The Role of the Victim ......................................................... 53 First Glimpse: The Emergence of the Victim Within Crime Narratives ....................... 54 Helen Jewett and Maria Bickford: Mid-Nineteenth Century Prostitute Murders ......... 66 Evidence and Retroactive Sentencing: The Victim’s Biography .................................. 72 Prostitutions and Fallen Women: The Emerging Preferred Victim .............................. 77 Victims and Belief in a Just World ............................................................................... 80 The Standard Victim?.................................................................................................... 84 Chapter Four – Authors, Power, and Authority in Crime Narratives ............................... 86 Author, Authority, Ethos ............................................................................................... 88 Changing Locus of Authority ........................................................................................ 92 Constructing a Narrative of Guilt .................................................................................. 95 Authors, Identities ......................................................................................................... 98 Prescribed Distance: Audiences, Victims, and Criminals ........................................... 103 Authors and Borrowed Ethos: Expert Witnesses ........................................................ 105 iv “Writing by Numbers” ................................................................................................ 108 Ritual and Resolution .................................................................................................. 115 Chapter Five – Twentieth Century True Crime: Authors, Subjects, and Audiences ...... 117 In Cold Blood (1966)................................................................................................... 120 Capote as Author ......................................................................................................... 121 Narrative-Making in In Cold Blood ............................................................................ 124 Random Violence, Guilt, and Motive: Representing the Criminal ............................. 127 Helter Skelter (1974) ................................................................................................... 136 Helter Skelter as Motive: Proving Manson’s Guilt ..................................................... 138 Representing Victims and Criminals in Text and Photographs .................................. 143 Complicating the Author-Subject Relationship .......................................................... 149 The Stranger Beside Me (1980) .................................................................................. 151 Author as Friend or Foe .............................................................................................. 152 Bundy’s Victims: Beyond the “Less-Dead” ............................................................... 158 Photographic Evidence: Victims and Criminals ......................................................... 162 Fear and Order ............................................................................................................. 166 Chapter Six – Twenty-First Century Crime, Twenty-First Century Victims ................. 168 The Evolution of Ann Rule: Victim Representation in the Twenty-First Century ..... 169 Complicit Victims, Redeemable Criminals ................................................................. 176 Contemporary Crime Narratives, Historical Roots ..................................................... 178 Sources ............................................................................................................................ 180 1 Abstract This dissertation examines the consumption of crime narratives in America, from seventeenth century execution sermons to the contemporary genre of true crime. These crime narratives serve to encourage orientation of the community toward the figures involved, including criminal and victim, and adapt with changing cultural and social norms. In responding to situations that have disrupted communal order, the crime narrative functions as a restoration ritual that aids members of the community responding to and recovering from the presented threat: a crime or transgression of taboo. While early religious texts focused on the figure of the criminal, a community member that has been misplaced or given power that he should not possess, secular texts began to incorporate and establish the role of the victim within the crime narratives. These texts present us with the genesis of putting the victims’ innocence on trial along with the question of the criminal’s guilt. It relies on interpretative formats of the victims’ biographies to support the criminal’s actions and even earn them acquittals in court. Every aspect of the victim – from body to biography and including race, class, and gender – functions as clues and evidence to both identify the criminal and label the victim as complicit in his/her own demise. The ritual thus functions to reinforce preestablished notions of guilt, innocence, and justice. The contemporary true crime genre, often thought to have originated in the twentieth century, instead draws on these historical texts, their orientations toward criminal and victim, and their function as restoration ritual, creating the true crime genre as the contemporary reenactment or response to communal upheaval. The attitudes present within contemporary true crime reflect the long history of the consumption of crime narratives on American soil. Best-selling true crime books such as In Cold Blood (1966), Helter Skelter (1974), and The Stranger Beside Me (1980) support this established communal orientation toward criminals and victims. The more recent Green River, Running Red (2004) serves as an example of how embedded these beliefs and orientations have become, proving their adherence to the ritual and reinforcing its role of affirming cultural beliefs in justice, guilt, and redemption, regardless of the criminal’s or victim’s individual identity or relative situation. 2 Introduction On November 15, 1959, four members of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, were murdered in their home. Friends and neighbors mourned the senseless deaths of Herbert, his wife Bonnie Mae, their daughter Nancy, and son Kenyon, reacting to a crime
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