Now that true crime obsession has gone mainstream, a whole host of dilemmas and debates have wormed their way into everyday life. We’ve asked Tori Telfer, author of Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History and the host of the Criminal Broads podcast to tackle the weightiest issues of the day from around the crime community. Each month, she checks in with readers to help solve their most pressing true crime quandaries.
Send your questions to crimereads@lithub.com, subject line “True Crime Advice.”
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TRUE ROMANCE
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Any true-crime-inspired dating tips? When to be worried?
—Laurie, Concord, MA
Say you’re walking through the door of a little French bistro, and you see your date waiting nervously for you at the end of the marble bar. Your potential paramour is wearing a cute pair of thick-rimmed glasses, just like Gary Ridgway; they’ve got a light-up smile but serious eyes, just like Aileen Wuornos; and as they help you with your jacket, their palpable charisma can’t help but remind you of Charles Manson. Are you dealing with your future soulmate, or the Mad Butcher of Manhattan?
First, LOOK AT THE EYES. Lesser minds than ours may insist that eyes are the windows of the soul; you and I know, of course, that eyes are the windows to the serial killer. Look into the eyes and see if any of the following adjectives come to mind: Flat, fish-like, vacant, soulless, cold, icy, emotionless. To borrow a phrase from one of Ted Bundy’s lawyers, do your date’s eyes look like “peepholes someone else was peering out of”?
Next, ask them about their childhood. Casually weave in questions like, “I just love a crackling fire in the winter. Did you ever happen to set any?” “What do you think about torturing animals?” “Bedwetting: perfectly normal up until the age of twenty. Agree or disagree?” and probably most importantly: “Any juvenile head injuries?”
If the eyes check out, if they pass the MacDonald triad test, and if you’re pretty sure that any childhood head injuries weren’t of the frontal lobe variety, then I want you to examine them for a certain air of . . . pompous grandiosity. Not all pompous blowhards are serial killers, of course. Some of them go into politics; others get an MFA! But many of the world’s worst criminals share a certain sense of wounded entitlement. A bitter narcissism. An all-the-world’s-a-stage-and-all-the-men-and-women-merely-players-EXCEPT-ME sort of vibe. Watch out for it.
As the relationship progresses: Is there a room in their house that you are forbidden to enter? Do they have all sorts of odd, wrinkly objets d’art scattered around their abode that, upon future inspection, appear to be human ears? Are they constantly stirring colorless powders into pots of tea and insisting that you have another cup? You know, Dating 101 stuff.
Listen, the world is a cruel place full of sketchy people, and so it’s natural to be on edge when you put down your book on the Milwaukee Cannibal and open an account on Match.com. But here’s something that may make you feel a bit better. Once the date was over, you may realize that—while the wine flowed and the conversation bubbled and your knees kept touching under the table—your date never actually asked you to describe the layout of Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment when it was finally raided by police. You volunteered that information. Turns out you were the creepy one, all along.
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FIRST (CRIME) LOVES
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What first interested you in true crime?
—@eaglerockshort
Unlike a lot of true crime readers, I can’t point to a specific case, book, or mugshot that sent me into an obsessive spiral of I gotta know everything. I came at true crime from the world of fiction, and my obsession was more of a slow boil that I didn’t even notice at the time, like the proverbial frog in the pot.
For a long time, I wanted to be a fiction writer. Short stories, specifically. I wrote a lot of them, both inside academia and out, and they were often very dark, and the weird thing is I didn’t really realize that. I was/am a cheerful person, prone to wearing pink. My goth phase was so milquetoast that I doubt my parents noticed it. And yet I was writing about serial killers, mothers who murdered their children, girls who got buried alive, and an apocalyptic society where we ran out of cemetery space and so had to bury dead people in our own backyards and the result was that their bones popped out of the ground. (Edgy!!!) In my non-writing life, I liked pop music and Anne of Green Gables, but at my desk, I liked writing about things that just felt…BIG. I liked emotions and high stakes and evil little children and forcing my characters to have moments of sickening fear. Yes, I realize that if one polishes their writing craft correctly, one can wring high stakes out of a paragraph describing the way a single bird flies lonesomely across the crimson sunset or whatever, but come on. THE BONES ARE POPPING OUT OF THE GROUND AGAIN!!!!
Then I wrote a piece about a terrifying person who was actually real: the brutal Hungarian countess Erzsébet Báthory. I couldn’t believe how compelling the whole process felt; the research and the writing satisfied something primal in me—call it writer’s bloodlust. Here were emotions, high stakes, sickening fear, things that felt BIG. I was writing about brutal Hungarian interrogation techniques and lonely, Gothic castles where mad Countesses were walled up in their bedroom as punishment for shedding virginal blood, and it scratched the same itch that fiction did, except it was even better, this time, because it was real. (And actually—I’m just realizing this now—bones do pop out of the ground in the Erzébet story. I’m serious! She was a maniac!)
So I guess I got interested in true crime because I’ve always been interested in stories, and crime stories are stories turned up to an eleven, and I find them very satisfying to explore, and very illuminating to think about, and I especially love how they weave their wicked/tragic tentacles through culture for decades. (Did you hear that a new Lizzie Borden book just came out?!) I guess what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t come to true crime because of the crime, I came because of the nature of the genre. I still wear pink. I am still not goth. I still like Anne of Green Gables (okay, love). But when I sit down at my desk, I still want to be sinking my teeth into something that feels like life and death.
