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Editor’s note: Rachel Monroe is a journalist and “Savage Appetite: True Stories of Women, Crime, and ObsessionHer writing has appeared in Best American Travel Writing 2018, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and elsewhere. The opinions expressed here are her own. Read more opinions CNN.
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For as long as humans have consumed media, we have been intrigued by stories about the dark corners of the human experience. murder ballad and pop songs Tell about a terrible death. In the 18th and 19th centuries, cheap publications detailed shameful crimes—”horrific brutality and bloody murder” and promising “terrible disclosure! –Widespread.
It’s very similar to the “true crime” genre that permeates cable TV, streaming services and podcast charts — stories detailing the murderer’s actions, the victim’s vulnerability and how he almost got away with his crimes.
Unsolved crimes haunt our hunger for certainty, answers, and justice. It’s tempting to go over the facts of a case again and again, hoping to find a message that will unravel it all and end it all.This must have proven to be a dire situation The murder of four college students — Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle — were stabbed in Moscow, Idaho.
Murder has always been a particular subject of public fascination. However, the most reported homicides tend to be the most representative. This particular case has many of the hallmarks of a killing that has become a national obsession.
The murder was brutal and for weeks the suspect was on the run.Victim is heartbreakingly young and has been killed at university, a safe place many of us like to imagine. The murderer inexplicably stabbed four roommates to death, but left two alive.
Immersing ourselves in such a horrific story may be an attempt to make it less horrific: If we understand what happened, maybe we ourselves can avoid becoming victims. Some true crime buffs I’ve talked to tell me they do it out of empathy. They see staying up late reading cases as a way of connecting with victims and not letting them be forgotten.
Of course, there are also less flattering motives. for some people, consumer true crime presenting an opportunity to indulge their appetite for lurid details. For others, it’s an exercise in superiority: what happened to you happened to you because you were careless, or knew nothing, or deserved it. It never happens to me.
True crime stories can trigger our best and worst instincts. Empathy can crystallize into voyeurism; a desire for justice can cross boundaries into a demand for vengeance.
rear i wrote a book Regarding women’s obsession with true crime, I’ve mostly stayed away from the genre. I thought I had gotten over my obsession, but the stories of these four murdered college students entered my head. Before I go to bed, I visit the various subreddits devoted to the case—Moscow Murders; Idaho Murders—to see if any new details emerge.
I scrolled through the social media accounts of the victims, staring at pictures of them dazed and alive, almost unbearable. I brought up these crimes at a dinner party before seeing the pained faces of other people, and realized, too late, that murder didn’t make for good table talk.
However, the more time I read about this case online, the more disturbed I am. In the hunger for more details, some people seem to forget that we’re talking about a real tragedy that happened to a real person, not an episode of a TV show.
They discussed the case with feverish enthusiasm and were angry that police had not released more details. They guessed who the killer’s “target” was, as if the storyline needed a protagonist. They attacked anyone who had the bad luck to be loosely connected to criminal activity—an awkward neighbor, someone who was in a food truck with two victims, a random professor—seeing them as potential culprits .
These amateur detectives concoct all sorts of ridiculous theories, as if they were expecting a killer with complex motives on an episode of Criminal Minds. They dissect the lives of their victims, examine their love choices, and expose their families’ criminal records.
to late December, when police arrested a suspect At his parents’ home in Pennsylvania, national attention to the case reached a fever pitch.after the suspect was arrested has been extradited Returning to Idaho from Pennsylvania, he was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary.
The final twist in the narrative surrounding the case so far is that the suspect is pursuing a doctorate in criminology: once he completes his studies, he might be expected to help apprehend criminals. Instead, he was charged with a gruesome quadruple homicide.
Since the arrest, attention has turned to the surviving housemates, especially the young woman who, according to police, saw a stranger leave the house.paralyzed by fear see masked intruder At her home, she retreated to her room and locked the door.
the way this young woman harass Especially shocking. It is impossible for any of us to know how we will respond. But a lot of people feel justified in passing judgment on someone they don’t know, someone who lost four friends a few hours ago in the worst way imaginable.
Of course, the fascination with gruesome murders in Idaho is understandable. It’s the kind of crime that seems pulled out of a nightmare: A stranger enters your home and kills you in your bed.
But the internet and true crime make a dangerous combination. We’ve become so used to having so much information at our fingertips that it’s easy for our interests to slip into the right, as if we’re owed aggressive details just because we’re curious. Social media’s incentive to maximize engagement fuels wild speculation among users.
But the friends, family, neighbors, and school community affected by this crime don’t have the luxury of distance; for them, this case is all too real.
In our obsession, we sometimes find it easy to forget that our online posts have real-world consequences. To be sure, most paper detectives and online spectators will move on, but probably only after the next lurid crime starts grabbing the headlines.
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