Toward a Theory of True Crime Narratives

A Textual Analysis

Ian Case Punnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367892784
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351180467
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Toward a Theory of True Crime Narratives vivifies how nonfiction murder stories are told, what role they play in society, and in the form of true crime why they remain enduringly popular internationally on every platform. This book establishes for the first time the actual line—or dotted line—between mainstream journalism and the multimedia phenomena of true crime. Presenting a stable definition of what is—and what is not—true crime will either challenge or justify Truman Capote's claims regarding the creation of a "new journalism" with In Cold Blood, and accordingly expose the reluctance of the promoters of NPR's Serial, HBO's The Jinx, and Netflix's Making a Murderer to refer to their products as such. This research codifies true crime texts of various types on multiple platforms—radio, television, print, digital, and film—to reveal the defining characteristics of the genre.

1 An Outline in Chalk

Securing the Scene

The mass media genre known as “true crime” is experiencing international multi-platform success. According to Apple, Serial, the 12-part podcast investigation of a 1999 murder on NPR’s This American Life website, reached the five million downloads mark faster than any podcast in history (Dredge, 2014, para. 3). In 2017, as Siobhan A. McHugh of the University of Wollongong, Australia, noted, the S-Town podcast had ten million downloads in the first four days, “far surpassing even Serial. It has been rapturously reviewed by The Atlantic, The New York Times and respected podcasting critic Nicholas Quah in Vulture” (McHugh, 2012, para. 2). Critical praise for Serial was also effusive. Although The Telegraph called it “badly written” (Simons, 2014, para. 12), after The Guardian called Serial “a truly remarkable piece of journalism” (Simons, 2014, para. 8), Dwight Gardner of The New York Times admitted that, at its best, Serial had made “many of us drive a bit wobblier” as we experienced “the occasional tingle of campfire-narration awe” (Gardner, 2014, para. 2). Few scholars accurately identified that the podcast’s greatest appeal came from how the show “fit so squarely in true crime” conventions (Durrani, Gotkin, & Laughlin, 2015, p. 2).

The same can be said for Andrew Jarecki’s The Jinx on HBO (Lawson, 2015, para. 4). His six-part serial exposed the murderous trail of billionaire Robert Durst, a reclusive man accused of killing three people over 30 years. With a Hollywood budget and high-television production values, including hours of crime scene reenactments, Jarecki narrated much of his sojourn as “the cat” to Durst’s “mouse”—an interplay that ended with Durst being caught on camera seemingly confessing to the three murders, one of which he had been tried for, but never convicted.

Aired within months of each other, Serial set the stage for a new trial for a man who had been convicted, and The Jinx forced a new murder indictment for a man who had been found innocent. Serial won two Peabody Awards for excellence in radio, the first ever for a podcast; The Jinx won two Emmy Awards for “best documentary.” Serial and The Jinx were both nonfiction murder narratives based on actual but non-contemporaneous news events, packaged and sold as entertainment; yet neither was identified as a true crime text.

Similarly, Truman Capote went to his grave insisting that his arguably most famous work, In Cold Blood, was “new journalism” or “a nonfiction novel” rather than true crime. According to Browder (2010), “Whether or not Capote invented something called the ‘nonfiction novel,’ he ushered in the serious, extensive nonfiction treatment of murder” (p. 205). Because In Cold Blood made reading about gory crime—in this case, the random murder of a farm family in Holcomb, Kansas—“respectable,” it allowed daily newspapers, Sunday supplements, and news magazines to write in a true crime style—with all of its sensational detail—under the newly legitimated banner of “new journalism” (Browder, 2010, p. 205). Pulitzer Prize-winner Madeleine Blais, a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts, credited Capote as being the first writer who “turned reality into a kind of fiction” (Jensen, 2005, p. 1).

Making a Murderer, a ten-episode Netflix documentary series that brought international attention to the obscure case of Wisconsinite Steven Avery (Gray, 2016, para. 5), engendered some of the same criticism levied at Serial and The Jinx, and true crime in general: “(T)hey turn people’s private tragedies into public entertainment” (Schulz, 2016, para. 24). In the same fashion as their respective networks promoted Serial and The Jinx, Netflix never publicly categorized Making a Murderer as true crime, preferring to define it as a “documentary” instead, but whether Making a Murderer documented long-form investigative reporting was not clear. According to a review in The New Yorker, “for others close to the original case, Making a Murderer seems less like investigative journalism than like highbrow vigilante justice” (Schulz, 2016, para. 19).

Mass-mediated nonfiction murder narratives often defy easy categorization. While conventional journalistic crime coverage and true crime texts may appear to be compatible, consumer and editorial confusion exists because there is no overarching theory that determines what is and what is not true crime. To that extent, the full history of true crime’s origins, its best practitioners, and future iterations cannot be known with any certainty. Without a meta-theory, true crime could be perceived as some intangible nonfiction “other.” Scholarship is overdue on effective criteria to determine when journalism crosses the plastic, yellow-taped line into true crime.

This monograph marks off the terrain of a “Theory of True Crime” akin to how Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Theory of the Novel” explicated fiction narratives. A Theory of True Crime is needed as a breakthrough device that mass communication and journalism scholars can use to organize the study of true crime texts by their most common, consistent elements. Before that theory can be codified, however, a foundation of common terms and concepts must be established for the uninitiated and the less experienced reader.

To undergird a Theory of True Crime, it is important first to clarify what is meant by theory. According to Wacker (1998), theory provides “guidelines,” a “framework of analysis,” or a “structure” where differences of opinions can be adjudicated on a level playing field (p. 362). In a business context, for example, “theory development reduces errors in problem-solving” by integrating a new body of knowledge from any type of relevant research (Wacker, 1998, p. 362). A Theory of True Crime, therefore, proposes to outline “the precise definitions in a specific domain to explain why and how the relationships are logically tied so that the theory gives specific predictions” of what is and what is not—in this case—true crime (Wacker, 1998, pp. 363–364).

By definition, “true crime” is an occasionally controversial multi-platform genre that is most often associated with murder narratives and shares some common ancestral heritage with journalism, but always has been driven by different impulses. True crime stories are narratives that are best understood as “the story of real events, shaped by the teller and imbued with his or her values and beliefs about such events. Narratives can be textual, visual, aural or a mixture of the three” (Murley, 2009, p. 6). True crime magazine layouts of the 1930s emphasized a mixture of written text, diagrams, illustrations and crime scene photography, real or reenacted, at a time when news photography in general, according to Helen Caple (2013), was not viewed as a “credible medium for news reporting” (p. 4).

As the eye-catching characteristics of true crime increased in popularity and influence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, vanguards of “proper” journalism still regarded all news photography as “supplemental,” at best, to the written word (Caple, 2013); that is, the perception by many journalists was that only people who could not read needed pictures. Meanwhile, the visual appeal of true crime magazines was built on what today would be called “intertextuality.” Intertextuality, as defined by Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993), is most simply “the juxtaposition of different texts” (p. 305); however, intertextuality also creates a conversation in these juxtapositions that “depends on the connections made by the reader,” connections that reverberate and create further “connections to literary texts that postdate the text they are currently reading” (p. 306). Intertextuality, then, is a dialogue between all the existing elements in an artifact—such as a webpage and a podcast—the interpretation of those elements by the reader, and the imagined elements that the reader continues to bring to the text. The typical true crime mixture of written text, diagrams, illustrations, and crime scene photography “led the illiterate to … want to learn to read,” making true crime magazines a bridge “from the original elite media to the current-events cacophony” of today (Godtland, 2013b, p. 7).

True crime’s critics, however, have either ignored true crime as merely “criminal stories sold as entertainment” (Frost & Phillips, 2011, p. 90), or dismissed it as lurid “leisure reading … of (crimes) that do not have to be contemporaneous or currently newsworthy” (Biressi & Bloom, 2001, p. 1). Many scholars define true crime as “sensational” versions of murder stories, “emotionally charged content mainly focused on violent crime, to a broad public” (Wiltenburg, 2004, p. 1377). Yet, to academic curators of true crime’s history, such as City University of New York’s Jean Murley, nonfiction murder narratives deserve greater scholarly attention for the many ways in which they have influenced American culture and reportage (Murley, 2009).

Browder (2010) states that true crime is not as a corruption of crime journalism, but as a form of documentary, albeit a dystopian one: “Whereas the traditional documentary is generally designed to raise people’s consciousness about terrible conditions in order to effect change, true crime presents a picture of problems that are insoluble” (pp. 125–126). Browder (2010) insisted this is because “True crime is a politically slippery genre. On the one hand, true crime books uphold conservative values—policemen are heroes, criminals are punished, sometimes by death,” but it is also subversive “in that they tend to question the very foundations of patriarchal culture—the family in true crime is often a poisonous unit” (p. 126). Similar to the rise in popularity of hard-boiled crime fiction that happened concurrently to true crime and was often authored by the same writers, true crime “brought a tabloid sensibility into high culture and has illuminated the sordid with beams of truth” (Murley, 2009, p. 2). In sum, true crime reports on past newsworthy murder narratives, with an emotional component intended to prioritize such sensations as horror, fear, pain, and frustration, which is either to its shame, or its credit, depending on the disposition of the observer.

In contrast to the subjective conversation about what is true crime until this writing, a definition of modern journalism would appear more stable. Seen one way, journalism is a long-established multi-platform discipline that attempts to disseminate recent events following a “news objective paradigm that took hold after World War I” (Graves, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2016, p. 105). The image of the truth-telling reporter steeped in “traditional ideals of objectivity and impartiality seem[s] to dominate many newsrooms across the globe, and one can find many similarities in professional routines, editorial procedures, and socialization processes” on every continent (Hanitzsch, 2007, p. 367).

Of course, journalism is not limited to nonfiction murder narratives, as it uses the same principles of purported objectivity to cover politics, sports, weather, and so forth. Reportage has experienced periods of flux, however, and what is considered the mainstream of journalism today might have been unrecognizable to mainstream journalists of another era. According to Deuze (2005), historically, scholars and practitioners of journalism have not always agreed on a definition: “scholars are comfortable to refer to journalism as an occupational ideology, the distinct building blocks of such an ideology are sometimes left to the imagination of the reader” (p. 446).

Underneath the veneer of the desired objectivity, journalistic ideologies have been known to shift. In the mid-1800s, for example, reporters and editors were not expected to be “agnostic” when it came to writing from their religious, political, and social perspectives (Graves et al., 2016, p. 104). While an effort to be dispassionate in a near-scientific recitation of facts is a point of pride for modern journalists, scholars also identify as “one of the paradoxes of journalism that it is not entirely agreed what journalism actually is” (Hampton & Conboy, 2014, p. 156). Indeed, even in similar democracies, “given the differences in work roles and editorial control mechanisms between German and U.S. newsrooms Donsbach (1995) even refers to both cultures as ‘two very different professional worlds’ ” (Hanitzsch, 2007, p. 367). In a recent academic journal debate between Hampton and Conboy (2014), it was argued that journalism should be thought of in two different ways: as a collection of literary genres and as a profession with established norms and rituals. “Taking such an analytical approach, we are not limited by whether rhetors in the past used the word ‘journalist,’ ” and journalism is better defined by how it functions, not by best practices (p. 156).

This monograph will not attempt to define “what is journalism” either, but merely dispense with the notion that, however more stable a definition of “conventional journalism” may have been over the last century, it too has experienced periods of flux. This is relevant because the historical record of nonfiction narratives reveals that traditional journalism often both reviles and plunders true crime for its rhetorical treasures. These two have history.

The Background Check

Murder narratives are as old as creation; true crime, in fact, was born into the literary world naked and unashamed. In the Holy Bible, the first human born also became the first murderer: “Now Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let’s go out to the field.’ While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him” (Genesis 4:8, New International Version). For Bible literalists, Cain’s killing of his brother is arguably the first, complete murder narrative: a motive was established, the murder was committed, a cover-up was attempted, the crime was solved, and the perpetrator was brought to justice—with God as the first homicide detective. Regardless of whether the reader chooses to view Genesis 4 as merely an apocryphal life lesson, the biblical model of communicating “morality through murder stories” has been a part of Judeo-Christian culture ever since. In colonial America, for instance, murder narratives appeared earliest in the form of “execution sermons” (Cullen, 2013, p. 23).

According to Scott Seay, the author of Hanging Between Heaven and Earth (2009), execution sermons were performed elaborately to a public gathered for the capital punishment of a man or woman in colonial America and England. These execution sermons sought both to confirm the civil magistrate’s authority to execute a citizen, and emotionally and theologically to support the condemned in their final minutes. For example, in the execution sermon of Moses Paul, an Indian convicted of killing another Indian named Moses, Samson Occam, “a minister of the gospel and a missionary to Indians,” declared, “Death is the king of all terrors, and it ought to be the subject of man’s and woman’s thoughts daily” (Chamberlain, 2004, p. 415).

In early America especially, socially approved killing was usually a somber occasion, a way of bringing order back to chaos, so the execution sermons had to be a public act of sense-making (Seay, 2004, p. 17). It was important to the Puritanical, colonial sensibility that an execution served a greater purpose. If sense-making is defined as “a way station on the road to a consensually constructed, coordinated system of action” (Taylor & Van Every, 2000, p. 275), then a properly executed sermon was as important to early American society as a properly executed criminal.

After the industrialization of the United States, execution sermons—the blueprint nonfiction murder narratives—became secularized in the form of printed tracts that were sold cheaply, and eventually led to sensational crime narratives and cheaply illustrated books (Cullen, 2013, pp. 11–12). After a 19th-century crime wave caught the national attention, the public’s fascination with the criminal justice system popularized “police” magazines (Murley, 2009, pp. 22–23). As well as featuring early sports reporting and racy “girlie” photos, these androcentric magazines tracked shocking crimes, police officers investigating the crimes, brutal criminals, and the early forensic techniques used to apprehend them. “In the big Eastern cities, New York in particular, crime proliferated within the hungry, packed-in, largely immigrant neighborhoods…. It was within this climate of crime and fear of crime that true crime reporting began in earnest” (Godtland, 2013b, p. 8).

As neighbors started shutting doors to neighbors in the late 19th century, due to the attention given the crime wave, many newspapers established themselves as moral crusaders (even while they published murder narratives with the most fear-inducing, gory, and salacious details). “The first wave of the attack was textual; it was the second, visual leap that sowed the seeds of the 20th-century detective magazine. This leap was taken by The National Police Gazette” (Godtland, 2013b, p. 8). In the early part of the 20th century, the Police Gazette was similar to television’s America’s Most Wanted or Cops, but it also contained sports reports and pictures of bathing beauties, like a true “men’s magazine.” The Gazette was one of many magazines published by an early health food enthusiast and body builder, Bernarr Macfadden, a vain man who often featured himself on the cover of his own muscle magazines.

Scholars concur that another early influence on true crime came from Edmund Lester Pearson’s Studies in Murder in 1924. Pearson was a Library of Congress librarian, scholar, and author of several work...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 An Outline in Chalk
• 2 The Exploratory Study: A Proper Search
• 3 The Findings: Two Sides to Every True Crime Story
• 4 Conclusion and Discussion: The Verdict
• References
• Index