I've had a bit of an obsession with watching and reading about true crimes - specifically, murders. I prefer historical cases for my reading pleasure and more contemporary for TV watching. Either are fine if it's a movie. I cannot really explain these preferences, and I'm completely baffled by my obsession - I'm merely laying it out here.
Honest fiction truly bores me now. I have always loved the historical novel; E.L. Doctorow is my favorite author who almost exclusively writes historical fiction. I prefer less fiction, but I also want it to be interesting, entertaining, meaningful in a way that sometimes real life does not readily provide. I completely understand that the lines between truth and fiction are not always so clear nor do I need them to be. Of course, that fact is most apparent in true crime cases; eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable, suspects often report a series of lies from which they, themselves, cannot always discern the truth. We tend to agree that there is a definitive, singular reality that occurred in the past through a sequence of events that we would call, The Absolute Truth, which is the goal of crime investigators to attempt to uncover. In reality, we can never truly know that Absolute Truth. In fact, in our country's court system, it is not the goal to reach that Absolute Truth - merely to convince twelve people of the guilt or innocence of somebody's responsibility in perpetrating such crime, "beyond a reasonable doubt." I am not a lawyer, but this is clearly a goal that is quite different and, honestly, much less satisfying to most people interested in history - or just any real story - but it is much more realistic for the functionality of our society. If we had to discover every detail of a story before moving on to the next one, justice would never be served. So, I understand all of this quite well.
But, of course, I still like a good story. And I generally want all the details - well, of course, the ones that make the story good. This is where fiction can easily add to a real event to bring it to life.
In any case, to come back to the main subject of the post - True Crime Murders - I wanted to write about what I've learned so far from my year long obsession (possibly longer). I will preface this as only anecdotal observations from a selection of real crimes, presented to me in a very particular fashion through the media, and thus, it is still wrought with skewed points of view and likely errors, etc. Even so, I think I've made some interesting observations.
1) All murderers are crazy. Absolutely. Who kills someone as a solution to anything? You have to be nuts. Therefore, I really don't think there should be an "insanity" defense. I think that's a given. Just because you're insane doesn't mean you shouldn't be locked up, away from society. If necessary, we could lock the particularly insane folks up in a separate jail for the insane - I mean a real jail, though. There could be three types of institutions: 1) Jail for criminals 2) Jail/mental ward for criminally insane people who have hurt others 3) Mental ward for insane people who do not hurt others.
2) Most murders are caused by someone you know - ok, this is actually a well-known fact. So is the fact that most murders are caused by someone very close to you, like a lover, spouse, significant other, or another type of family member.
To me, this is the hardest fact to comprehend...and yet, it's also easy to recognize. People have said that love and hate are just two sides of the same coin. I might agree - but more that hate arises as the lack of love and it comes from the vacuum of love being taken away - not just never there, but there then taken away. I've felt this vacuum, as I assume most of us have. It is so much more painful than just no feeling of love at all where there might potentially be some at some point. For instance, no one hates someone they've never met, never even heard of before. But they hate their ex-(boy/girl)friend. Yet, when you think about it...this is the saddest fact there ever was - to hate when you used to love.
I think one of the biggest challenges of our lives is to find out how to continue to love through the vacuum, when the love has been taken away from you - or even if it's just a perception on your own part that it has been taken away. All it needs to be is the perception because it's that feeling of the loss that causes the hate - it doesn't actually need to be a reality that there is a loss of love there, it just needs to feel that way. If we all learned how to get through this feeling without losing our own love to hate, there would be a lot less murder - in fact, it might be completely abolished, altogether.
3) Most people who commit murder are kind of stupid, yet arrogant. Thinking that you will "get away with murder" is both arrogant and generally just plain ignorant. There are only a few circumstances that could lead to you getting away with murder: a) you never, ever, ever, ever tell anyone else about it AND b) the time/place of the murder is in a very high crime region where the police department has a huge backlog of cases and they do not have enough time to process everything quickly and it's not a high-profile case (this scenario might only extend the time until getting caught, though), or it's just plainly an incompetent investigation or trial/case OR c) you didn't touch anything or leave any trace of your presence, nobody saw you, you didn't hire anyone to do it, there is absolutely no trace of whatever killed said person and it looked like an accident or death by natural causes AND d) you never do it again.
I'm not trying to tell anyone how to kill someone and get away with it, but I think those are the criteria and I think the likelihood of fulfilling all of them ('a+b' or 'a+c+d') is probably the same likelihood/percentage of murderers who get away with murder - as in, approaching 0%, but not 0%. 'b' is totally chance, so one cannot really rely on that. Thus, a murderer would really have to do 'a+c+d' if they wanted to truly guarantee that they get away with it, and that is nearly impossible.
However, there was one story that I watched that satisfied 'c' (the hardest part to satisfy). The problem, of course, was that he bragged about how he would kill someone (negating 'a'), and he was one of a handful of possible suspects, so the investigators looked to see if he did what he said he would do (poison the person with this very particular substance that is lethal, yet only stays in the body for a very short period of time, with a half-life of like 30min or something) and they found it in the victim's body (just in the-nick-of-time). He was thus convicted. It was likely, also, that his previous lover or spouse (I cannot remember) was also killed in the same manner, but it had not been ruled as a homicide (negating 'd'). Therefore, he had satisfied 'c', but not 'a' or 'd', thus causing his demise. In any case, the guy was clearly too arrogant to 'get away with murder'. You cannot brag. Ever. And...if you get away with it once, you cannot do it again.
Of course, we rarely hear of the cases where people 'get away with murder'. The ones we hear of or know of are the ones where 'b' was satisfied, usually due to an incompetent investigation or trial/case. And those are still conjectures on the part of the public. Such as O.J. Simpson, Casey Anthony...those are the only two I know of at the moment. Historically, of course, murderers got away with it a lot more often, due to the fact that the investigative tools were not nearly as good as they are now. Now we have DNA and methods of extracting very, very tiny amounts of DNA and testing it. We also have huge DNA databases to compare these samples against. There are other tools that we have that have improved, as well, but DNA has been the most compelling, by far.
It's funny to me, though, that it's usually the murderer, themselves, that gives themself away. It's often just their mouth - talking, bragging, writing. One lady was so dumb - so dumb - that she mispronounced anti-freeze as "anti-free", which she used to poison her husband. She typed a suicide note as if it was from him, in which is "anti-free" was also written. When the investigators took her in to the station to interview her, she had a slip of the tongue when they asked which glass she poured his drink into and she said, "well, when I poured the anti-free -" and then caught herself and got all angry and flustered. That's when they knew it was her. Dumbass. I mean, the whole thing is stupid, but the shear stupidity of this woman, and yet she must have thought she could get away with murder... really?!
Obviously, it appears to be a lot of work to try to "get away with murder". It seems to me that it would be much easier just to 'let go' and 'move on' with your life. Get a divorce and pay your alimony and/or child support if it comes to that. It's much easier to do that than live the rest of your life in jail or be on death row. However, murderers are short-sighted, stupid and arrogant. And crazy for thinking that murder was a solution to anything.
I mean, sometimes I'm arrogant - and I probably have a lot better reason to believe so than most of these murderers I've heard about - but I would never think I could get away with murder. Luckily, I've never had the desire to commit murder.
In any case, to come back to the main subject of the post - True Crime Murders - I wanted to write about what I've learned so far from my year long obsession (possibly longer). I will preface this as only anecdotal observations from a selection of real crimes, presented to me in a very particular fashion through the media, and thus, it is still wrought with skewed points of view and likely errors, etc. Even so, I think I've made some interesting observations.
1) All murderers are crazy. Absolutely. Who kills someone as a solution to anything? You have to be nuts. Therefore, I really don't think there should be an "insanity" defense. I think that's a given. Just because you're insane doesn't mean you shouldn't be locked up, away from society. If necessary, we could lock the particularly insane folks up in a separate jail for the insane - I mean a real jail, though. There could be three types of institutions: 1) Jail for criminals 2) Jail/mental ward for criminally insane people who have hurt others 3) Mental ward for insane people who do not hurt others.
2) Most murders are caused by someone you know - ok, this is actually a well-known fact. So is the fact that most murders are caused by someone very close to you, like a lover, spouse, significant other, or another type of family member.
To me, this is the hardest fact to comprehend...and yet, it's also easy to recognize. People have said that love and hate are just two sides of the same coin. I might agree - but more that hate arises as the lack of love and it comes from the vacuum of love being taken away - not just never there, but there then taken away. I've felt this vacuum, as I assume most of us have. It is so much more painful than just no feeling of love at all where there might potentially be some at some point. For instance, no one hates someone they've never met, never even heard of before. But they hate their ex-(boy/girl)friend. Yet, when you think about it...this is the saddest fact there ever was - to hate when you used to love.
I think one of the biggest challenges of our lives is to find out how to continue to love through the vacuum, when the love has been taken away from you - or even if it's just a perception on your own part that it has been taken away. All it needs to be is the perception because it's that feeling of the loss that causes the hate - it doesn't actually need to be a reality that there is a loss of love there, it just needs to feel that way. If we all learned how to get through this feeling without losing our own love to hate, there would be a lot less murder - in fact, it might be completely abolished, altogether.
3) Most people who commit murder are kind of stupid, yet arrogant. Thinking that you will "get away with murder" is both arrogant and generally just plain ignorant. There are only a few circumstances that could lead to you getting away with murder: a) you never, ever, ever, ever tell anyone else about it AND b) the time/place of the murder is in a very high crime region where the police department has a huge backlog of cases and they do not have enough time to process everything quickly and it's not a high-profile case (this scenario might only extend the time until getting caught, though), or it's just plainly an incompetent investigation or trial/case OR c) you didn't touch anything or leave any trace of your presence, nobody saw you, you didn't hire anyone to do it, there is absolutely no trace of whatever killed said person and it looked like an accident or death by natural causes AND d) you never do it again.
I'm not trying to tell anyone how to kill someone and get away with it, but I think those are the criteria and I think the likelihood of fulfilling all of them ('a+b' or 'a+c+d') is probably the same likelihood/percentage of murderers who get away with murder - as in, approaching 0%, but not 0%. 'b' is totally chance, so one cannot really rely on that. Thus, a murderer would really have to do 'a+c+d' if they wanted to truly guarantee that they get away with it, and that is nearly impossible.
However, there was one story that I watched that satisfied 'c' (the hardest part to satisfy). The problem, of course, was that he bragged about how he would kill someone (negating 'a'), and he was one of a handful of possible suspects, so the investigators looked to see if he did what he said he would do (poison the person with this very particular substance that is lethal, yet only stays in the body for a very short period of time, with a half-life of like 30min or something) and they found it in the victim's body (just in the-nick-of-time). He was thus convicted. It was likely, also, that his previous lover or spouse (I cannot remember) was also killed in the same manner, but it had not been ruled as a homicide (negating 'd'). Therefore, he had satisfied 'c', but not 'a' or 'd', thus causing his demise. In any case, the guy was clearly too arrogant to 'get away with murder'. You cannot brag. Ever. And...if you get away with it once, you cannot do it again.
Of course, we rarely hear of the cases where people 'get away with murder'. The ones we hear of or know of are the ones where 'b' was satisfied, usually due to an incompetent investigation or trial/case. And those are still conjectures on the part of the public. Such as O.J. Simpson, Casey Anthony...those are the only two I know of at the moment. Historically, of course, murderers got away with it a lot more often, due to the fact that the investigative tools were not nearly as good as they are now. Now we have DNA and methods of extracting very, very tiny amounts of DNA and testing it. We also have huge DNA databases to compare these samples against. There are other tools that we have that have improved, as well, but DNA has been the most compelling, by far.
It's funny to me, though, that it's usually the murderer, themselves, that gives themself away. It's often just their mouth - talking, bragging, writing. One lady was so dumb - so dumb - that she mispronounced anti-freeze as "anti-free", which she used to poison her husband. She typed a suicide note as if it was from him, in which is "anti-free" was also written. When the investigators took her in to the station to interview her, she had a slip of the tongue when they asked which glass she poured his drink into and she said, "well, when I poured the anti-free -" and then caught herself and got all angry and flustered. That's when they knew it was her. Dumbass. I mean, the whole thing is stupid, but the shear stupidity of this woman, and yet she must have thought she could get away with murder... really?!
Obviously, it appears to be a lot of work to try to "get away with murder". It seems to me that it would be much easier just to 'let go' and 'move on' with your life. Get a divorce and pay your alimony and/or child support if it comes to that. It's much easier to do that than live the rest of your life in jail or be on death row. However, murderers are short-sighted, stupid and arrogant. And crazy for thinking that murder was a solution to anything.
I mean, sometimes I'm arrogant - and I probably have a lot better reason to believe so than most of these murderers I've heard about - but I would never think I could get away with murder. Luckily, I've never had the desire to commit murder.
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