It was a Friday night in June, the 7th of June, specifically. The year, even more specifically, was 1996. Twenty-five years later, I still remember it was a Friday. I’m not sure how this event popped onto my radar. I was rushing around through life with 3 kids: 10, 7, & 6. This would’ve been deep into our sports years, though June usually meant baseball was all but over. Still, school was out, and summer was in full swing. But there it was, a news story to top all news stories. I wasn’t even paying attention to the television, until I heard my then husband say, “Hey, look at this. I framed that house.” With my mom hypnosis broken, I abruptly stopped thinking about the dishes I was washing and the price of avocados and looked at the TV. The on-scene reporter was rapidly talking – murder blah blah, children blah blah, Darlie Routier blah blah, Rowlett blah blah. I think I may have dropped the plate I was drying. The world stopped spinning.
I get asked, quite a bit, in fact, why I have an infatuation with true crime. I’m not sure that I have an answer. I think we kiddos of the 70s and 80s were unwitting audiences to how mass media could influence crime, both how it glorified the perpetrator and how it helped law enforcement solve the cases. We saw it all play out. Our parents watched the news without fail, after all. Walter Cronkite told us all about things like the Manson family, Ted Bundy, and The Son of Sam. I remember watching, with horror, the result of a single person, Jim Jones, and his ability to convince 918 other people to drink poisonous Kool-Aid. I didn’t sleep well for a month after Patty Hearst was kidnapped. I was forever changed the day Adam Walsh went missing from a Hollywood, Florida Sears. In order to stop the monsters, it seems, you have to scrape them from the dark corners and bring them into the light. But, when they’re in the light, you can see them. And, horrifyingly enough, they don’t look like monsters. They look like the guy that mows your Aunt Opal’s lawn and the mechanic that overhauled your mom’s transmission. Early on, I subliminally developed a therapeutic method of selfcalming for such troubles. If you soak in every detail about a thing that disturbs you, it loses some of its mojo. And, so it began.
July 21, 1991 was a Monday. I had a 10-weekold baby, my first & only daughter. Puff paint t-shirt sets for moms were all the rage, as were spiral perms. I can virtually guarantee I was sporting both of those as I sat down to nurse my baby and discovered that a hysterical, bloodied man named Tracy Edwards ran down a street in Milwaukee and led police back to the apartment of Jeffrey Dahmer. I dove into the story with abandon. In August of 1997, still reeling from the Routier case, which, incidentally, did include a house my then husband framed, I got a phone call from a friend deep in East Texas. “Girl, I know how much you love all this creepy crime stuff.” She went on to tell me that a family in Carthage, TX hadn’t been able to reach an elderly relative for a year. Once the police became involved, her body was recovered from her own garage deep freezer, courtesy of a former mortician turned personal assistant/caregiver turned murderer, Bernie Tiede. Jack Black did a bangup job playing Bernie in the movie, incidentally. In June of 2008, I wasn’t doing much of anything. I was deeply depressed, still reeling from the recent death of that precious daughter and a more recent cancer diagnosis. I wasn’t watching much television, but I was often staring at it, absentmindedly. Enter the Jody Arias case. A year’s long discovery period & conviction would show that she did, in fact, track down and kill ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander. Her protests were hard to stomach, especial-ly in light of the recovery of the camera she used to snap photos of the scene. Five years later, I would record every single moment of her televised trial. Back in those days, however, macabre crime case details quoted by PTA moms did not dinner party appropriate chat make. But, little did I know what the future would have to offer me.
In 1992, something shattering happened. Dateline premiered on NBC. Early on, there was less grizzle and more Wobegon. Stone Phillips & Jane Pauley were master storytellers, after all. But, the people want what the people want. Here we are, 29 years later, still tuning in weekly to hear about all things devious and felonious. Dateline was only the beginning. Suddenly, we formerly misunderstood moms could gather at little league games, in the waiting rooms of dance studios, and at our office water coolers, eager to dissect that last episode. We realized we weren’t the only ones who could wipe grape jelly off a kid’s face and simultaneously say, “When they said they had fingernail scrapings, I knew the husband did it.” Now we have new seasons of Unsolved Mysteries, a revamped Forensic Files, and, of course, innumerous podcasts dedicated to season’s long deep case dives. Turns out, there were legions of us – perfectly genteel and generally well socialized folks who kept the scary monsters at bay by soaking in every sinister detail. All this leads to one massive synopsis. Even the most horrible things in this world can be made more palatable when Keith Morrison talks.
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