Public Intellectual with Jessa Crispin · Jessa Crispin

"Women <3 True Crime" (w/ Mikita Brottman)

August 19, 2019·42 min·2 clips

True crime's 'pretty white girl murder' fantasy is about being important and desired, not about safety — you're far more likely to be killed by your dad or boyfriend than a stranger.

The appeal starts with resolution. Crispin can almost see why people want bad events shaped into a story that finally ends. Then her patience runs out. The trouble here is the obsession with one kind of victim, one kind of murder, and one clean fantasy of danger. The guest makes the monster smaller. Evil is not treated as cinematic or far away. It looks more like bored, sad, lonely people in ordinary family situations. Less thrilling, yes. Harder to dismiss, too. That breaks the fantasy that violence belongs to someone like Ted Bundy instead of familiar domestic misery. Crispin keeps pushing. To her, the perfect serial killer is a projection, the shape people wish evil would take because it is tidier than real life. The Monkey's Paw comes in as a bleak little turn of the screw: grief wants the child back, fantasy offers an answer, and the answer is unbearable. Then the book takes over. The guest remembers seeing missing posters for a conspicuously large, handsome thirty two year old man and getting morbidly curious before his body was found in her own building. The physical details are awful. He had fallen, been pushed, or jumped from the roof of a former hotel, gone through an annex, and landed in a disused office. No lesson cleans it up. The conversation sits with the pull of fascination, even when the listener knows something about that pull feels wrong. Near the end, Crispin and the guest push back against the saintly dead girl habit. A victim might have been ordinary, difficult, disliked, and still worth mourning.

As heard by us

A bracing true-crime discussion that looks past the crime and toward the appetite around it.

Jessa Crispin and Mikita Brottman take direct aim at true-crime fascination, especially the pull of an idealized killer, a certain kind of victim, and the reassuring idea that ugly events can still be neatly resolved.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

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Want a true-crime episode that argues back at the genre?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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