4 True Crime

The first essay in Joan Didion’s celebrated 1968 collection of nonfiction Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a true crime story. Titled “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” in the book, the essay focuses on Lucille Miller, who was convicted of burning her husband to death in the San Bernardino Valley in 1964. Didion recounts the crime as an event inspired by media narratives—about success, about manipulative and aspirational housewives, about California and upward mobility. The land itself seems to be more of an agent, even, than the people who inhabit it:

This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-a-Devotion but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school. “We were just crazy kids,” they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.1

In this country, Didion writes, Lucille Miller is a “tabloid monument.”2 Her criminal conviction—she would serve seven years of a life sentence, then be granted parole in 1972—was based on a “curiously predictable story.”3 Miller’s recorded phone conversations sound like dialogue from a film noir, like Double Indemnity, and in her story, Didion finds “the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.”4 That is, life in this middle-class, aspirational country was removed from history—no one remembers the past, everyone looks to the future—and therefore their lives are determined by narratives, tropes, and styles from popular culture. Reality follows a script.

“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” was originally published in 1966 as an article in the Saturday Evening Post, with the title “How Can I Tell Them There’s Nothing Left?” The article’s title is a quote from Lucille Miller at the scene of the crime, as she thinks about what she will tell her children about their father. The article partook of the “true crime” genre that was then, as it is now, in vogue. Just months before, Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood was published to much critical and popular acclaim. This coincidence was not lost on Dan Wakefield in his review of Slouching Towards Bethlehem in the New York Times. He noted, “Now that Truman Capote has pronounced that such work may achieve the stature of ‘art,’ perhaps it is possible for [Didion’s writing] to be recognized as it should be: not as a better or worse example of what some people call ‘mere journalism,’ but as a rich display of the best prose written today in this country.”5 While the book collection elevated the work beyond “mere journalism,” Didion’s article appeared in the Saturday Evening Post with familiar journalistic attributes. The article was printed alongside a photograph of the Miller’s suburban home and burned-up car.

On the magazine article’s subsequent pages, Lucille Miller’s wedding photo and mugshot as well as action shots from the courtroom conventionally frame the story with visual references. Yet unlike the typical true crime stories to which we’ve been accustomed—which focus on, in Capote’s case, the complex life stories that lead up to criminal activity or, in works like the documentary podcast Dirty John (2017) or the documentary television series Surviving R. Kelly (2019), the patterns of serial offenders—Didion casts the crime of Lucille Miller as part of a larger cultural narrative of ambition, dreaming, and selfishness, a feature of the American landscape more so than a reflection of an individual psychology. The essay concludes with an iconic Didion sentence, which makes a metaphor of a fashion accessory. The man with whom Lucille was having an affair, and for whom, it was believed, she killed her husband, gets married to “his children’s pretty governess, Wenche Berg.” Of their wedding day, Didion writes: “The bride wore a long white peau de soie dress and carried a shower bouquet of sweetheart roses with stephanotis streamers. A coronet of seed pearls held her illusion veil.”6 The “illusion veil” is, on one hand, a mere description, following Didion’s careful and precise accounting of the bridal outfit. On the other hand, though, the illusion veil is metaphorical. The image concludes the essay with an ironic flourish, as the “dreamers” in the San Bernardino Valley continue to dream their golden dream, continue to live in a perpetual present where the future is full of promise and individual aspirations are felt to be individual, not the clichés that Didion points them out to be.

The illusion veil of ahistorical individual ambition is a definitive feature of neoliberal culture, in which individual drive is both an ideal of free market subjecthood and a rationale for success or failure. Attaining happiness is a sign of individual drive and determination marked by the acquisition of wealth, property, and the moving target of wellness monetized by gym memberships, spa treatments, and time away from work. Failing to achieve these goals is evidence of a personal shortcoming, a lack of entrepreneurial determination and discipline. And it is not only individual subjects who are viewed through this framework. We increasingly view inhuman structures—governments, corporations, educational institutions, multinational brands—as individuals that succeed or fail on personal terms. For example, the 2003 documentary film The Corporation concludes that given the history of corporate abuses of workers, consumers, and the environment, any contemporary corporation analyzed as a person would be a psychopath. While the entrepreneurial individual is venerated in neoliberal culture, that figure is also subject to critique, as in The Corporation, for violating the public good that, paradoxically, neoliberal reforms often turn into matters of private responsibility. By documenting and diagnosing the corporation in this way, the film uses tropes common to the “true crime” story. In true crime narratives, the moral conservatism of neoliberal culture becomes apparent, making clear that the twinned discourses of entrepreneurialism and personal responsibility serve a policing function, one that homes in on individuals while neglecting structural forces.

An iconic example of the true crime genre is the 1974 bestseller Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders. In the book, Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry represent Charles Manson as a master manipulator: “Manson created his own band of schizophrenics. . . . He brought to the surface their latent hatred, their inherent penchant for sadistic violence, focusing it on a common enemy, the establishment. He depersonalized the victims by making them symbols. It is easier to stab a symbol than a person.”7 Bugliosi’s account emphasizes the power Manson exerted over his “family” and focuses on noirish details about Manson’s cruelty and depravity, such as when he notes that “at the same time the LaBiancas were being murdered, the man who had ordered their deaths [Manson] was sipping a milk shake.”8 In another true crime best seller, The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule chronicles her own relationship with the serial killer Ted Bundy as well as the brutal murders he committed. In the book, Bundy is repeatedly flagged by both Rule and Bundy’s fiancée as a suspect in a rash of disappearances and murders, yet Rule emphasizes how unlike a criminal Bundy seemed: “I could not believe he was guilty.”9 Different from Manson, whom Bugliosi and Gentry describe as projecting cultish charisma, Bundy nonetheless shares a key element with him. Both are represented as masterminds, seeking to undo the very social fabric that makes individuals feel safe. Bundy, for example is described as playing “some kind of perverse game of challenge . . . as if, each time [he abducted a woman], he would come a little further out of the shadows, take more chances, to prove that he could do what he wanted and still not be caught, or even seen.”10

This vision of crime—as a predominantly egotistic endeavor, a kind of entrepreneurial individualism gone astray—folds neatly into both the shifts in policing and the emergence of family-values politics that have defined much of neoliberal culture. As Christopher Wilson has argued, policing has increasingly come to rely upon citizens and self-policing in the neoliberal era, which coincides with moves toward the privatization of the public sphere. Since the 1960s, we have come to view crime as a matter to be addressed through risk management, a logic that “has actually abandoned any genuinely collective (or macro) sense of a greater good” and instead privileges responsible and affluent individuals as the core constituents to whom safety is a consumer good, not a public good.11 Moreover, American politics under neoliberalism has increasingly sought to maintain the sanctity and moral centrality of the nuclear family in American society. As Melinda Cooper has argued, “In a somewhat paradoxical fashion, private family responsibility would become the guiding principle of [neoliberal] social policy.”12 True crime books like Helter Skelter and The Stranger Beside Me function much like the antidrug public programming undertaken by the Reagan administration in the 1980s. They publicize the dangers individuals and, more importantly, individual choices pose to the neoliberal culture that nurtures that very individualized conception of social life.

This chapter will focus on how true crime narratives and our fascination with them place individual subjects in relation to structures and institutions, beginning with psychological accounts of criminality in genre-defining works. True crime is a unique documentary genre, not only because it is so ubiquitous across media forms, from television and films to prose and podcasts, but because it is a genre that so clearly engages with formulaic narrative tropes. Following an exploration of works that develop those tropes, I will explore how a contemporary writer, Maggie Nelson, and a contemporary photographer, Taryn Simon, have sought to represent crime in a way that avoids the genre tropes so common in true crime. Nelson’s The Red Parts and Simon’s The Innocents develop modes of interrogating the often gendered and racial types that have become concretized in true crime and have had real effects in the criminal justice system. In so doing, Nelson and Simon both build on the history of documentary experimentation since the 1960s and refine their documentary styles to emphasize not the reader- or viewer-centered moralism we usually expect from true crime but the uncertainty and open-endedness that result both from crime and from the uneven, often unjust processes of the justice system. In their documentary works, victims, criminals, and innocents are represented not as types to be grounded in the rhetoric of journalistic truth but as lives rewritten, overwritten, and exploited by crime. True crime, then, is undone by documentary aesthetics, thus staging the relation between subjective experience and the impersonal structures that give shape to contemporary experience in more complex ways.

Moral Economy

As with any genre, true crime traffics in tropes—the murderous husband, the young woman under the spell of a charismatic killer, the manipulative wife, the alienated heartthrob, and more. These tropes have been refined in a number of nonfiction bestsellers such as Helter Skelter, The Stranger Beside Me, In Cold Blood, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979), and Joe McGinnis’s Fatal Vision (1983), as well as on television programs such as 20/20, American Justice, and Forensic Files. As Janet Malcolm influentially argued in the late 1980s, true crime journalism is particularly vulnerable to embellishment. In her account, a journalist like Joe McGinnis operates as “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness,” and when one of his subjects is not “a ready-made literary figure,” the journalist must “fashion a Raskolnikov” from an otherwise mundane person.13 Indeed, even in her critique of true crime journalism in The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm uses the very genre tropes that she argues overdetermine the journalist-subject relation, “seduction and betrayal.”14 In true crime narrative, genre precedes reality.

Along with the character tropes and genre conceits that often preoccupy narrative accounts of crime, there are structuring principles that often ground true crime stories. In Joe McGinnis’s Fatal Vision, for example, the author posits that the suspected, and later convicted, murderer Jeffrey MacDonald could have committed violent acts because of his use of diet pills. “With the amphetamines swelling the rage to flood tide,” McGinnis asks, “would it be too much to suggest that in that one instant . . . a critical mass had been achieved . . . and that by 3:40 A.M. of February 17, 1970, the ensuing explosion of rage had destroyed not only Jeffrey MacDonald’s wife and daughters, but all that he had sought to make of his life?”15 This kind of forensic hypothesis, supported by expert testimony, offers the comfort of plausibility. It makes sense of what might otherwise seem a chaotic tragedy.

In his more recent book about Jeffrey MacDonald, A Wilderness of Error, Errol Morris finds holes in the prosecution’s and McGinnis’s case against the convicted murderer. Like Janet Malcolm, Morris sees in McGinnis a writer who chose to craft a story about “a truly demonic figure,” rather than “MacDonald as an innocent man . . . not a terribly compelling figure.”16 Eschewing psychological and toxicological explanations of MacDonald’s possible motivations, Morris instead is interested in the “totality of the evidence,” which he staunchly believes was never properly considered because MacDonald was suspected early on in the police’s investigation.17 Yet, as one of MacDonald’s lawyers, Bernard Segal, argued in court in 1979, “Physical evidence doesn’t say a darn thing. . . . The only thing that is speaking is not the physical evidence, but it is the interpreter speaking. Who is the interpreter of the evidence for you?”18 Morris’s emphasis on the “totality of evidence” is demonstrated even in the design of his book on MacDonald, which features full-page line drawings of objects in between each of the book’s sixty-five chapters, as well as reproductions of maps, letters, photographs, and official documents. The book was illustrated by the Pentagram design firm to further its argument. The design firm’s description of that collaboration captures the significance of the illustrated objects throughout the book: “Early on in the design process, simply to create a visual inventory, the designers reduced the objects to simple line drawings. Morris was so struck with the deadpan quality of the drawings that he suggested the designers create even more, and further, . . . make them a significant visual element of the book. Reversed out of black, they seem both childlike and sinister, and serve as guideposts as Morris leads the reader through the evidence. At the same time, the simplicity of the images complements the straightforward nature of Morris’s analysis.”19 As in the line drawing of the overturned coffee table at the scene of the crime (fig. 12), the illustrations throughout Morris’s book offer a kind of minimalist clarity in comparison to what he describes as the “wilderness” of problems that bother him about MacDonald’s trials. On one hand, Morris’s A Wilderness of Error emphasizes how evidence can be selectively used to construct a narrative. On the other, the book relies on material evidence in its very design to emphasize the indexical power of objects and documents. This is a seeming contradiction that can be resolved if we place this book in the context of neoliberal culture. The official narrative about MacDonald’s guilt is to be distrusted, as it was crafted both by institutions, the district attorney’s office and the police, and an author chasing a bestselling story. Institutions, and especially government institutions, are unreliable and hostile to individual interests in our neoliberal imaginary. Instead, the mute objects and documents placed in front of the reader by Morris resonate as reliable precisely because the individual reader/viewer and the independent documentarian are the arbiters of the evidence. The “totality of evidence” can only be weighed by individuals. Thus, Morris does not solve the crime anew but merely displays alternatives and gaps, leaving a collection of objects and documents for each individual to weigh. Instead of legal decisions and procedures, we are left with a moral imperative to decide for ourselves. Dismissing true crime tropes and toxicological speculations about an individual run amok, Morris designs a narrative about the evidentiary capabilities of objects and the interpretive sway of forensic analysts. Both McGinnis’s and Morris’s approaches share in neoliberal conceits, through their disinterest in social systems and their individualized imaginaries. In McGinnis, the murderer is a failed individual, lacking the willpower and determination to continue living a normal domestic life, and in Morris, the individual reader and not the judicial system should be the final arbiter of justice. Neither account leaves much room, if any, for a social conception of crime and violence.

Recently, the narrative tactic of hypothetical explanation employed by McGinnis has appeared in the podcast S Town, produced by This American Life in 2017. S Town is an investigation into the life and death of John B. McLemore, an idiosyncratic clock restorer in rural Alabama. McLemore committed suicide, and alongside his history of discussing suicide and persistent depression, the podcast presents mercury poisoning from “fire-gilding” old clocks as a potential overarching explanation of McLemore’s behavior and mental state. Similar to McGinnis’s invocation of amphetamine use, S Town’s presentation of mercury poisoning posits narrative closure as a possibility for the reader or listener: “Doctors and scientists who are experienced in dealing with mercury, when my researcher or I have described John’s fire-gilding practices, they say judging from that alone, it’s almost inconceivable that he wouldn’t have some level of mercury poisoning. Then when they hear about John’s symptoms, the physical ones, plus the anxiety, the depression, the paranoia, the fact that he committed suicide, that all makes them even more confident that he was suffering mercury poisoning. One expert said, you’d almost have to prove that he didn’t have it.”20 Whether it is mercury poisoning or amphetamine abuse, these explanations produce closure through a representation of a failed individual. The purview of the true crime story shrinks, homing in on individual choices that can serve as moral signposts.

In documentary films about crime, form follows individual closure, often with close-ups that narrow the field of vision to individual agents and the evidence that damns them. Examples of this kind of structure include the Maysles brothers iconic 1970 documentary Gimme Shelter, in which footage of Meredith Hunter’s murder by Hell’s Angel Alan Passaro during the Rolling Stones’ concert at Altamont features prominently. The documentary unfolds chronologically, yet when Hunter is stabbed during the concert, the film cuts to an editing room. In the editing room, Mick Jagger asks to have the tape played back. The event of Hunter’s murder is replayed in slow motion, with both Hunter’s pistol and Passaro’s knife pointed out. Jagger looks at the replay solemnly, saying, “So horrible.” After this interlude in the editing room, the film returns to the Altamont concert, where the Rolling Stones play “Street Fighting Man” and then leave on a helicopter. Following their escape, the film cuts back to the editing room, where Jagger says “See y’all later” and gets up to leave. The film then freezes on Jagger’s face and zooms in, with filmmaker David Maysles visible behind him. In her review of the film for the New Yorker, Pauline Kael compared Gimme Shelter to the Zapruder film of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and found the scenes of Jagger in the editing room to be evidence of the documentary’s contrivance:

When Mick Jagger is seen in Gimme Shelter pensively looking at the Altamont footage—run for him by the Maysles brothers—and wondering how it all happened, this is disingenuous movie-making. . . . Gimme Shelter has been shaped so as to whitewash the Rolling Stones and the film-makers for the thoughtless, careless way the concert was arranged, and especially for the cut-rate approach to keeping order. The Hell’s Angels, known for their violence, but cheap and photogenic, were hired as guards for five hundred dollar’s worth of beer. This took less time and trouble than arranging for unarmed marshals, and the Hell’s Angels must have seemed the appropriate guards for Their Satanic Majesties, the Stones.21

Kael’s critique of the film hinges on the ethical complicity of the filmmakers and musicians who, in part, created the spectacle of the Altamont concert. In the editing room close-up on Jagger’s somber face, the film seems to stage that complicity, as well. The close-up and zoom-in on Jagger’s face leads the viewer to look for something, an emotional response, a spontaneous reaction of some kind—he says only “So horrible” and “See y’all later,” and his face is not expressive, especially in comparison to the high-energy dancing and singing during the concert footage that surrounds the editing room scenes. By focusing on Jagger as the moral center of the film, Gimme Shelter presents a charismatic individual as the ultimate barometer of crime, yet Jagger’s impassive face offers less a way to feel about Hunter’s death than a face on which to project whatever the viewer feels. The structures that led to Hunter’s death—the poor planning of the event, the decision to hire Hell’s Angels as security, even the rock-and-roll outlaw image of the Rolling Stones—are outside the frame.

Gimme Shelter represents crime as something to be witnessed and responded to emotionally by individuals. That focus on individual responsibility channeled through evidence is also a prominent feature of Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line. The film concludes with a tape recording of David Ray Harris confessing to the murder of a police officer, a crime for which Randall Adams had been convicted. On screen, the viewer sees a tape recorder playing Morris’s interview with Harris:

Errol Morris: Well, what do you think about whether or not he’s innocent?

David Harris: I’m sure he is.

Errol Morris: How can you be sure?

David Harris: Because I’m the one that knows.

The documentary concludes with text, explaining that Adams was, at the time, still in prison for murder (he was exonerated and released from prison in 1989, shortly after The Thin Blue Line’s release in 1988). The tape recorder serves as a marker of the evidentiary quality of Harris’s confession yet also as a clear marker of the filmmaker’s presence and role as interlocutor. Grounded in the materiality of the tape recorder, the indexical crackle of the audio recording serves to persuade the viewer of Adams’s innocence and Harris’s guilt, while artfully leaving open a chasm between the visual and the verbal, a space in which the viewer serves as ultimate analyst of the material presented in the film. As in our neoliberal culture and its moral economy of policing, the individual is imagined as the final arbiter of crime. Justice is left out of the hands of institutions and placed in the domain of individual subjects, neoliberalism’s ideal barometer of right and wrong.

Similar to The Thin Blue Line, Andrew Jarecki’s 2015 documentary series The Jinx concludes with an audio recording of Robert Durst seemingly confessing to murder while in the restroom. On the screen, the viewer sees the empty conference room where Durst was being interviewed by Jarecki, while audio and subtitles record Durst in the adjacent bathroom, muttering: “What did I do? . . . Killed them all, of course.”22 The episode concludes as the lights are turned off in the conference room, and then the credits begin to roll. Durst’s bathroom recording is the documentary’s final moment, left without context or analysis of any kind, yet the visual and audio disconnect of the final sequence leaves open an interpretive chasm. On one hand, the viewer is left to decide what Durst’s words mean. On the other, the ambient tension in the empty conference room resonates as Jarecki’s own presence as filmmaker, as the empty room he provides for the interview is the stage on which Durst’s guilt is made evident. The Jinx concludes with both Durst’s confession of guilt and a lack of analysis that leaves it to the viewer to decide guilt or innocence.

These uses of evidence—toxicological speculation, tape-recorded confessions, slow-motion and zoomed-in video—serve to ground a true crime documentary in some kind of certainty, though it is a certainty left in the audience’s hands. The crime is solved, the event is made visible, the criminal is compelled to admit the crime, the individual viewer can weigh the evidence and reach a verdict. Yet this kind of closure is often at odds with how crime and violence function, as both structural conditions of exploitation that target the poor and as traumatic events that cannot be resolved or achieve closure. As Mark Seltzer has argued about true crime, media representations of crime reproduce violence as a condition of public life, a matter of statistical fact that makes bodies equivalent to other objects that circulate according to economic flows in our “pathological public sphere.”23 If the true crime genre is evidence of the ways in which documentary art has permeated popular culture, then modes of true crime documentary that resist or depart from true crime’s ubiquitous tropes also demonstrate how documentary art can make crime visible as a complex structural, economic, and psychological form of discipline in neoliberal culture.

Outside Genre

In Taryn Simon’s photographic project The Innocents, individuals who were wrongfully convicted of crimes and exonerated are photographed at sites related to the crime they didn’t commit. Some subjects are photographed at the scene of the crime—a place that they may never have visited before being photographed there for this project—while others are photographed at the site where they were arrested. Simon’s posed, large-format photographs give the wrongfully convicted a seeming agency, as they revisit (or visit for the first time) these sites under their own volition. They pose looking at the camera, turning the location of the portrait into a kind of stage for their presentations of self and the narrative of the crime. In her photograph of Troy Webb, for example, he stands at the scene of a sexual assault of which he was convicted and later exonerated, after serving seven years of a forty-seven-year sentence (fig. 13). In the photograph, Webb wears a suit, asserting professional, human dignity from within the muddy pine grove in which he stands. The height and number of the pine trees make him seem small, even hard to notice, in the photograph, which resonates with the series’ larger conceptual argument: individuals and their actual guilt or innocence are irrelevant to the structures of criminal justice in the neoliberal United States.

The text that accompanies each photograph details the crime for which the subject was sentenced to prison, as well as information about their arrest and release. The text that accompanies Simon’s photograph of Larry Mayes at the scene of his arrest, posed as he was found by the police “hiding beneath a mattress in his room” at the Royal Inn in Gary, Indiana (fig. 14), reads: “In October 1980, two assailants entered a gas station in Hammond, Indiana, threatened the clerk with a gun, demanded money, and forced her to leave with them. The victim was beaten with the gun and raped by both assailants before being released.” Details of Mayes’s conviction follow: “The victim identified Mayes as the smaller assailant in a photographic array, but only after failing to identify him in two live lineup procedures. At some point in this process, without the knowledge of prosecutors or defense lawyers, the victim was hypnotized. None of the fingerprints collected from the scene belonged to Mayes. Serological testing was performed on semen found on the vaginal swabs and underwear collected from the victim, but the results were not useful for identification.”24 The text concludes with Mayes’s account in quotes: “There’s so many guys in there that are innocent but can’t get a chance. They take us, put us in cages, and leave us there. You go there. The whole cell house is nothing but black dudes. It’ll always be that way.”

Larry Mayes served eighteen and a half years of an eighty-year sentence before being released after DNA testing exonerated him. The fifty individuals (forty-nine men, one woman) in Simon’s project are given their subjecthood back through photographic portraiture. This return to civil society is balanced by the presence of the “scene of the crime” as an irreversible past, something outside of which these subjects can never step. One of the interesting conceptual turns in The Innocents is the revision of what the “scene of the crime” means. Instead of being a site to be analyzed by a detective—as in so many forensic procedurals today, or in true crime books that reprint maps and blueprints of crime scenes—the scene of the crime in The Innocents represents both the originary crime itself, described in text, and the site of wrongful conviction and imprisonment. In The Innocents, the unjustly imprisoned look at you. The true crime genre’s commitment to presenting evidence of guilt or innocence for the reader or viewer to judge is inverted, and its reliance on forensic technology to attain a degree of certainty is revealed to be fallible and, in most of the cases included in the project, racially biased. Our fascination with true crime narrative is made visible as a potentially, and in practice clearly, reckless impulse, one that turns innocents into victims, one that multiplies rather than resolves crime.

Simon’s The Innocents returns to the scene of the crime, to produce a jarring juxtaposition of a violent setting with a different kind of victimized subject than is typical in true crime documentary. Similarly, Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts returns to a crime and revises its meanings and resonances. The Red Parts is a sequel of sorts. Nelson’s book of experimental poetry Jane: A Murder deals with the murder of her aunt Jane Mixer in 1969. The murder happened before Nelson was born, and the poetry volume tries, in Nelson’s own words, to account for “how one might live—how my family lived, how I lived—under the shadow of the death of a family member who had clearly died horribly and fearfully, but under circumstances that would always remain unknown, unknowable.”25 As Nelson was finishing Jane: A Murder, she learned that her aunt’s murder case had been reopened due to new DNA tests and that an arrest was eminent. Her attempt to reach a kind of closure around unknowability is then complicated by the looming chance of knowledge, of closure through investigation and trial.

But, the memoir posits, what might this pending closure accomplish? Nelson cites a passage from D. W. Winnicott that becomes something of a conceptual framework for her thinking about the trial and conviction that occupies the bulk of the memoir:

In one of his last psychoanalytic papers, D. W. Winnicott wrote: Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced. This statement has always been a source of great comfort to me. For years I took it to mean that the other shoe has already dropped, that you’ve already been to the place you fear the most, that you’ve already come back from it.

It’s only lately that I’ve realized that Winnicott is not suggesting that breakdowns do not recur. Now I see that he may be suggesting just the opposite: that a fear of breakdown in our past may be precisely what causes it to repeat in our future.26

This shift from a future-oriented to a past-oriented understanding of breakdown, from a sense that breakdowns have been overcome and therefore exist as specters to a sense that breakdowns repeat rather than resolve, moves the trial away from a sense of impending closure and to a sense of recurrence, repetition, and continued revisitation.

Nelson explicitly rejects the idea that justice can provide some kind of closure, and she does so by making clear that the closure offered by justice promises an impossible synthesis of the viscerally passionate and the idealistic:

I find the grammar of justice maddening. It’s always “rendered,” “served,” or “done.” It always swoops down from on high—from God, from the state—like a bolt of lightning, a flaming sword come to separate the righteous from the wicked in Earth’s final hour. It is not, apparently, something we can give to one other, something we can make happen, something we can create together down here in the muck. The problem may also lie in the word itself, as for millennia “justice” has meant both “retribution” and “equality,” as if a gaping chasm did not separate the two.27

Another way of describing this “chasm” within justice is to say that the narrative conceits of true crime trade on retribution, and they do so precisely by undoing equality through the use of conventional genre tropes.

When she is being interviewed for the pulpy TV program 48 Hours Mystery about her aunt’s murder and the 2005 trial, Nelson is told by the TV interviewer that she doesn’t need makeup: “They wouldn’t be filming me if I didn’t look good. . . . This is primetime, she winks. No black people, no bad teeth.”28 Nelson is taken aback by this, and questions what she is doing talking to this TV program: “Am I sitting here so that Jane Mixer can join JonBenét Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway, in the dead-white-girl-of-the-week club? . . . I’m sitting here because I wanted—I still want—Jane’s life to ‘matter.’ But I don’t want it to matter more than others.”29 This shift from the singular to the collective, to an individual life mattering as a way for all lives to matter equally, marks a kind of chasm, one that is linked to the difference between justice as retribution and justice as equality. The goal of justice as equality is to ensure that everyone cares for all, that those harmed have a way, however undefined, of “mattering.” Nelson strives to balance that equality with a recognition of real harm, and it becomes a question about her motive as a writer offering a true crime narrative of her own:

Am I sitting here now, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don’t want it to matter more than others.

I want to remember, or to learn, how to live as if it matters, as if they all matter, even if they don’t.30

Nelson’s revision from “remembering” to “learning” how life matters returns to Winnicott’s understanding of breakdowns. An understanding of equality entails a breakdown of sorts, a breaking down of the narrative structures that present crime and justice to us. A breakdown that removes us from the reality of our culture—where some lives matter and some don’t—to an equal world where systemic oppression and exploitation don’t turn the ideal of blind justice into a tool for unequal retribution and the extraction of profits.

Nelson’s invocation of photographs relates to this insofar as she denies sensationalism. Throughout the memoir, Nelson includes italicized descriptions of photographs presented as evidence during the trial rather than including the actual photographs. These text descriptions serve to distance the reader from the images, just as Nelson and her family struggle with whether or not to look at the crime scene and autopsy photographs as they are projected in the courtroom. After being advised that they might not want to view a particularly gruesome photograph of Jane’s body in the coroner’s office, Nelson serves as a lookout for her mother, who turns her head and closes her eyes:

Each time an image appears I look at it quickly, opening and closing my eyes like a shutter. Then I look a little longer, in increments, until my eyes can stay open. I know the image will stay on the screen for some time, until the attorneys and their witnesses have said everything about it that needs to be said. So there’s no rush. You can acclimate to it slowly. And the thing is, you do acclimate.

Well? my mother whispers from her bent-over pose.

It’s not so bad, I whisper back, but you might as well not look.31

Nelson’s detailed description of both the forensic photographs and her viewing of those photographs offers a kind of depletion of affect, a flatness that counters the righteous retribution and comeuppance tropes of true crime.

This flat idealism, coupled with the chasm that separates it from our genre-soaked reality, is made apparent in the memoir’s coda. It concludes with two funeral home viewings—Nelson’s mother recounts viewing Jane’s body, and Nelson herself remembers viewing her father’s body after his death. Nelson’s mother finds the funeral home viewing of Jane in 1969 to be jarring: “By the time she saw her sister at the funeral home Jane didn’t look like herself. She had that strange, bloated, alien look of the several-days dead.” Yet the autopsy photos that she sees in 2005 have a different effect on her: “But in this photo, taken within hours of her murder, she recognizes [Jane]. Even with the dark bullet holes, even with her hair matted with wet and dried blood, even with the stocking buried unutterably deeply in her neck, she recognizes her. She says she is glad to see her again. She says she is glad to see, finally, what was done.”32 Nelson then concludes the memoir with an account of viewing her father’s body before it is cremated: “He was wearing his glasses, which seemed right but odd, as I knew he did not need them anymore. His hands were folded on his chest and his fingers were dark purple at the tips. He looked like he was trying to keep a straight face, but was about to jump up and call the whole thing off. I am immortal until proven not! I looked at him long enough to be sure this was not the case. Then I told him I loved him, kissed his face, and walked out of the room.”33 This moment seems like closure, but it is more like preservation. Her father’s own words—“I am immoral until proven not!”—remain somewhat ambiguous here. Nelson is “sure this was not the case,” yet it’s not clear if she’s sure he’s not immortal or sure that his immortality hasn’t been disproven. Similarly, Nelson’s mother is “glad to see [Jane] again,” over thirty years after her murder. The memoir’s title itself, The Red Parts, refers to red letter editions of the Bible, in which the words spoken by Jesus during his life are printed in red. Nelson’s memoir uses italics, not red type, yet also presents the dead as still visible, still around, parallel to the photographs that are presented in court that conjure the dead back into our vision. The breakdowns that we fear, The Red Parts seems to posit, are also the breakdowns that allow us to see what equality might look like, in both death and life. Nelson’s mother opens all of the windows in the house, Nelson leaves her father’s body to re-enter the world. The breakdown of the distinction between death and life makes it apparent that the justice system cannot provide closure, cannot make wrongs right. Significantly, the initial charge brought against Jane’s soon-to-be convicted murderer is “open murder.” Nelson writes, “It means, essentially, murder without a story.” The lack of a story makes the trial and Gary Leiterman’s sentencing seem less like retribution and more like a reckoning of facts. As Nelson notes, “The incoherence of the act, the suffering it caused—these things are not negotiable.”34 And this, ultimately, is what makes Nelson’s memoir interesting as a work in the documentary aesthetic. It avoids sentimentality in its presentation of violence and suffering as “not negotiable,” and in so doing, Nelson’s own understanding of the trial—rather than that of the detectives, the lawyers, true crime television, even the court system—emphasizes the process as abstract, impersonal where the murderer is concerned. All things equal, suffering is not negotiable, and “the dead are the dead. Presumably they have finished with their wanting.”35 The Red Parts strives to make the trial both intensely personal and abstract, both about Jane Mixer and not at all about Jane and her family.36

In The Beauty of a Social Problem, Walter Benn Michaels notes that art strives to make clear the distance between its form and reality, thus making the difference between our feelings about something and the thing itself clear. In his reading of Nelson’s experimental work of poetry about her aunt, Jane: A Murder, Michaels argues that Nelson attempts to achieve a kind of aesthetic perfection, one that renders Jane a formal device rather than a person about whom we might have feelings. This is, he argues, a conceptual way of thinking about how “the cultural moment of increasing equality has been a financial moment of increasing inequality,” as Jane comes to matter as a contemporary work of art rather than a person who can represent the feminist past.37 In light of this, The Red Parts signals an attempt to reconcile aesthetic distance with the immanence of the artist, writer, and subject in the systems and structures of which art strives to gain some distant view. In Simon’s photographs and Nelson’s memoir, crime connects us to the world and to the systems of exploitation that determine us. Rather than occupy a negative relation to the world, these works engage it and produce in its materials something like survival. These works imagine survival within compromised conditions, the desire for a viewer and a reader, the marking of time spent, the making out of the past a reason to act differently in the present, not because of yourself, but because and in spite of the structures that make yourself meaningful. These works make apparent the relation of subject to structure, in ways that foreground how structures that promise closure oppress and exploit.

In our contemporary moment, it is becoming ever more pressing to realize how tropes around crime in the United States reinforce and affirm structural racism and exploitation. As Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele posit in When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, the experience of growing up black in the United States feels like living in “a world we did not make and did not know we had the power to unmake.”38 Realizing that the world can be unmade entails realizing that “the service we have offered to people, systems, and structures that did not love, respect or honor us” can be withheld or redirected, in ways that produce not more exploitation but a revision of belonging in the world.39